Cantu is a brand of hair products — normally used by “naturalistas” — that has recently become a new phenomenon. Being very into taking care of my natural hair, these are personally my favorite products to use. They promote healthy, strong, lustrous, hair for all different hair types. This meaning, anyone can use these products whether their hair is curly, straight, coiled, etc. Their products range from shampoo to conditioner to deep treatment masques.
The genre that I will be discussing is customer reviews on Cantu products. Customer reviews can be found online, on different websites. This particular genre are written by customers who have had experience with this product. It interacts with other genres such as product descriptions which can be found on the same websites. The issues that this genre may address are if the product works well, or pricing, and things like that. When people write customer reviews, their purpose is to inform future buyers on what they will be purchasing. The reader's view customer reviews to decide if this is the right product for them.
Normally customer reviews are written informally. People don't usually capitalize letters like "I" that should be capitalized. It's more like first-order thinking writing. Inclusive of this genre, previous buyers state their opinion on the Cantu product and describe if the product they used worked for them or not. Usually along with the review people rate the product with stars from one to five, five being the best.
One website that contains this genre is the Cantu Beauty website. This website is the official site of Cantu where you can order products, read or write customer reviews, and view product descriptions. The reviews on this website are somewhat lengthy. Most of them use plenty of exclamation marks and capital words to emphasize certain words. An example of one of the pieces from this genre is written by krmelkizz and it says, "I am all the way in love!!! I have been transitioning for 11 months and it feels like I have used a little of every kind of product. I first tried the leave in and the oil sheen. LOVE LOVE LOVE!!! I decided to get the curling cream and do a bantu knot twist out. This is the first time I've had definition like this and it's so moisturized. I am officially hooked for life. thank you!!"
Another website that contains this genre is Walgreen's official site. The customer reviews on here are just as long as the one on Cantu's site. They also use the same punctuation. An example from this is written by an anonymous customer who says, "LOVE LOVE LOVE IT FIRST FOUND THIS BY ACCIDENT WHILE ON VACATION IN FL. LOVED IT SO MUCH. LEAVES MY HAIR SOFT AND CONTROLLABLE. HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT TO CURLY THICK HAIR. GREAT FOR SLICKING HAIR BACK INTO A PONY TAILS. THEN FLAR IRON AT THE END OF THE DAY. LEAVES HAIR REALLY SOFT." As you can see, this person has some typos and aren't very picky about punctuation.
Lastly Sally's beauty website consists of pieces of the same genre. These reviews are very similar to that of Walgreens and Cantu's. They are long, they state their position on the product and rate it with the stars system.
I think that all of these reviews are very comparable and that none are better than any other. All the reviews almost have all of the same conventions and fulfill their purpose as a genre. Cantu products average a good 4.5 out 5 stars on all three websites! By the looks of it I did a great job choosing my hair care product.
Robinson!
ReplyDeleteYour blog looks great. Keep up the cool, reader-friendly work! ☺
You chose a great genre here, and I really like how specific/narrow it is—customer reviews on Cantu products works just fine.
Alright, so it’s very important that you exclusively focus on specific examples of these reviews. For instance, you wrote “Normally customer reviews are written informally. People don't usually capitalize letters like "I" that should be capitalized. It's more like first-order thinking writing” and I’m left wondering: really? Are you sure? How many reviews did you look at, and how many of the people didn’t capitalize “I”? And what might that signify—why would that be important? (PS: I love the connection you made to first-order thinking. ☺)
I was surprised to hear that didn’t think any reviews were better than any others. Did you find 1 review that stood out, and you thought: “Damn, what a thorough review! That person laid out everything that I could have possibly wanted to know.” Or did you find any reviews that made you want to buy the product? Or not buy it? (And if so, what criteria did they bring up that made you feel this way? Or what tone did they take that gave the reviewer more/less credibility in your eyes?)
In ENG 101-108, I’m trying to train you to become super-observant so that you can get down to the nittiest of details and adhere (if that’s what you want to do) to the audience’s expectations for all the different genres that you’ll write here on out. By gaining a deeper and more critical reading awareness, you’ll be able to adopt/adapt writer’s choices (their writing) into your own writing. You’re off to a good start, Karimah.
Z