Is There a Connection Between Bad Grammar and Negative Online Reviews?

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From Priceonomics:

The internet is full of people giving their opinion on things. From blogs to forums to social media, the internet is a tool that empowers people to share what they think. Most of the time, these posts are not particularly useful (and sometimes even harmful), but for e-commerce sites, user reviews have been revolutionary.

Right now, there are millions of products available to purchase online. Despite never seeing the product or knowing the specific seller, you can make a well-informed decision before buying just by reading the experiences of other people who already purchased them. Academic evidence agrees. Studies show that reviews matter for customer decision making.

But not all reviews are created equal. Some are thorough and provide details on a specific product feature, while others are vague and unintelligible gibberish. Research shows users put a higher value on well-written reviews. Websites like Amazon take this into account by letting you rate whether a review is helpful or not.

Reading through so many reviews ourselves got us thinking, is the quality of writing (spelling, grammar, etc.) markedly different between positive and negative reviews?

. . . .

[W]e compiled 100,000 reviews from thousands of different products. To make sure our data inputs were standardized, we specifically used reviews that had both a star rating (to help us determine if a review was positive or negative) and a written review. On this data, we completed a series of analyses that assessed three aspects of writing quality:

  1. Length of review
  2. Spelling errors
  3. Improper use of grammar

According to our data, negative reviews have a higher rate of misspelled words and a higher rate of incorrectly used apostrophes. They tend to be longer and have more details as well. Five-star reviews typically are shorter and often don’t include punctuation.

. . . .

From our findings, we can say that when people are writing negative reviews, they create longer and more error-filled prose than those who are sharing positive reviews.

. . . .

The next measure on our rubric of writing quality is spelling. Using a spell checker, we can flag all misspellings contained in our review text.

Before evaluating differences between positive and negative reviews, we want to get a sense of spelling aptitude in the overall dataset. The following table shows what proportion of our product reviews contain spelling errors and how many.

. . . .

From our analysis, we showed that five-star reviews have the lowest incidence of spelling errors and most grammar errors. One-star reviews had the most spelling errors, and more negative reviews tended to perform worse across grammar metrics. Still, positive reviews also have errors, as we saw with four-star reviews with apostrophes and five-star reviews with an end of sentence punctuation. Review length could be a factor contributing to the differences in the kinds of errors we see between positive and negative reviews.

Link to the rest at Priceonomics

PG suspects he’s not the only one who performs subconscious language analysis when he considers whether he’s going to give much weight to the reviewer’s opinion.

10 thoughts on “Is There a Connection Between Bad Grammar and Negative Online Reviews?”

  1. These days you can quickly leave a review from your mobile device. I’ve done it, and realized afterwards that there were errors. It’s too easy to make a dictation error or other typo a while using these small screens and harder to correct. If a review is otherwise worthwhile, I assume that errors could be because it was written from a mobile device.

  2. The well educated always respect the opinions of people who share their education I think. It lead to the outing of people like me. But comma placement and semi colons is the new use of cutlery?

    And if it’s as PG says it’s something subconsciously done then lol you’re all not only classist, i’m watching you and learning how to subvert you

    • I’m extraordinarily classist, tilly. I prefer people who are intelligent and thoughtful and have found them among all social, ethnic, gender and racial groups throughout my life.

  3. If a review is more than a few sentences, it is not the grammar and punctuation that allow someone to judge the reviewer: it is the content. Some people, when leaving a review, put some thought into what they say, and why, about the product. Those are the more valuable ones.

    Short reviews and badly written ones can give nuggets of information, but the longer ones are gold. It is hard to sound intelligent and thoughtful by accident, or for very long.

  4. I would be interested to see how many of the spelling mistakes were actually correct British English and how many of the grammar errors were Oxford commas. The Oxford comma itself having been considered poor English while I was at school.

    • They didn’t say which countries the reviews came from. Apparently when they say “grammar error,” they mean “missing apostrophe.” They give the example of “cant” for “can’t”, presumably because a spellchecker won’t flag it as wrong.

      I wonder if they took account of whether the review was submitted from a mobile device. Many on-screen keyboards make it harder to type an apostrophe than a real keyboard, and if you persist in entering “cant” for “can’t”, eventually the autocorrect is going to assume that’s what you mean.

  5. The most useless five-star review: “The product arrived on time!”

    The most useless one-star review: “The product arrived late!”

    Such a comment may be praise or complaint about UPS, FedEx, or USPS, but it tells no one anything about the product. Why don’t these “reviewers” realize that and just STOP IT ( <= an allusion to an old Bob Newhart skit)?

  6. “PG suspects he’s not the only one who performs subconscious language analysis …”

    Oh, my language analysis is absolutely deliberate…

    • One of my coworkers was a copy editor who had a sign on her desk that said, “I am silently correcting your grammar.” It’s just second nature; the trick is to not read too much into it.

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