here we are again for more b2 first writing today we will check out reviews and go into a lot of detail so make sure you keep watching hi and welcome to teacher phil where i help people like you pass the cambridge exam make sure you subscribe to the channel and like the video and you can also check out the full article in the description box below and with all that being said let's get right into it unlike essays reviews are not mandatory in the b2 first writing exam which means that you have different options to choose from for example emails and letters articles reports or stories depending on which exam you take be to first or b21st for schools also as with every writing task in b2 first a review needs to be between 140 and 190 words long and now that we have all the general aspects out of the way let's get into a little bit more detail according to official information from cambridge english reviews are always written for website a magazine or newspaper you always have to describe and discuss something for example a film a book a restaurant an experience or whatever the task might require you to talk about and you also have to make a recommendation at the end of your text there are a few things that you should focus on when writing a review first of all make sure that you address all the key points in the task as i said that includes a description a discussion element as well as a recommendation secondly it is important to engage the reader your review should be interesting so make sure that you use some language that keeps the reader looking for more and last but not least your review needs to be organized well that means you should think about the right paragraph structure and include some linking expressions to connect your ideas well once you sit down in front of a review writing task you need to analyze it task analysis is really the first step to a good review because it helps you extract some very useful information that you need once you start writing here you can see an example review task from b2first at first it might not look like anything more than a bunch of information but we can systematically go through it and find out everything we need by asking three easy questions the first question you should always ask is what is the topic of the text knowing the topic of the text sets the scene for you and your writing and you can already brainstorm some vocabulary that you might want to include in your review going back to our example task from before we can see here that the topic of this specific review is a book in which the main character behaved in a surprising way next in line you should always ask what exactly you have to include in your review here we go into a little bit more detail and we try to find the specific topic points we need to address in our text in this task there are three things we need to talk about we need to describe what the main character did we need to discuss why it was surprising for us and we need to say if we would recommend the book to somebody else as i said earlier there's always a descriptive element to a review as well as a discussion and a recommendation and this task is no different last but not least we need to find out who is going to read our text knowing the reader helps us choose the appropriate register for our review in our example task we are writing to a college english language magazine that means our readers are the students of the college as well as the teachers and possibly some of the parents because of all of that i would choose a neutral to informal style when writing the review we don't need to be too formal because after all some of the readers are students but at the same time we also don't want to be too informal as some of the readers are teachers and parents once we have extracted all the information we need we can now think about the best possible structure for our review every review in b21st writing is basically structured in the exact same way we always want to start with a title and introduction followed by the topic paragraphs in which we address the key topic points and last but not least we want to end the review with a conclusion and our recommendation all of this put together makes really good reviews but we need to look into each single part individually to understand what exactly it is that we have to do in order to achieve success let's get started with the title and introduction the main purpose of your introduction should always be to engage the reader and to peak their interest after all we don't want our readers to skip our review just after the introduction but instead we want them to continue reading here you can see an example introduction to our review right at the beginning i ask a question which is designed to engage the reader from the start i also give some general details about the book for example the title the author as well as the name of the main character i also hint at the surprising action but don't give away all the information because once again you want the reader to keep reading next we'll look at our topic paragraphs the topic paragraphs are the main parts of your review so they should be the longest parts and carry most of the information it is important for you that you stick to the point and support your ideas with examples and good language here you can see that i've decided to use two topic paragraphs in this review one for the description and one for the discussion section of the text in the description paragraph i give some information about the book like the characters when it is set and what the surprising action of the main character is i also add a lot of good language like adjectives and adverbs that make the whole description come to life a little bit more in the discussion paragraph i focus a little bit more on giving my opinion and using specific language to make that clear and finally we need to make a recommendation because after all that's the only reason why anyone would read a review they want to know what the reviewer thinks about the book the film or the experience and they want some help with their own decision so a good final paragraph of a review does exactly two things it includes a recommendation and a final sentence to round off the review and that's exactly what i've done in the example paragraph on your screen first i give my recommendation and then i end the review in a nice way by saying that i think that it was absolutely worth reading so there you go writing reviews is not that difficult after all always remember that reviews follow the same structure with an introduction topic paragraphs and a conclusion and we always need to describe discuss and recommend something thank you for watching as i said at the beginning of the video you can find the full article in the description box below there you can also find some other useful links for example to my free be to first writing cheat sheet as well as to my ultimate writing guide in which i've put all my experience as a cambridge teacher into an ebook for you you can also check out my different services and of course you can follow me on social media and with all that being said take care and i see you next time