I didn't really think my rating system all the way through when I first started, I have mostly been coming up with the numbers by instinct. Here I shall lay out all of the vague ideas I have in my head, and I will do my best to stick with it. However, I reserve the right to rate something as higher or lower than it technically is depending on how natural or plot-necessary it is.
Profanity
1. A couple of uses of made-up swearwords, or one or two uses of mild profanity, such as the word "damn" or "hell."
2. A few uses of mild profanity.
3. A single use of the word for an illegitimate son, or an impolite word for a woman, or the sh-word.
4. A few uses of the type of word listed in #3.
5. A single use of the f-word.
6. Frequent uses of mild profanity and one or two uses of a worse word.
7. Several uses of the words described in #3, plus a single use of the f-word or several uses of mild profanity.
8. A few uses of the f-word.
9. Many uses of all kinds of profanity.
10. Constant and pervasive use of strong language.
Violence
Violence is a harder category to quantify. You can have a battle with no blood, and a fistfight that is brutal or vise-versa. You can also have a bloody scene that doesn't bother you in it's context, or a fight with no blood that is psychologically more disturbing. For this category, I will be more general.
A significant amount of blood will earn a 4 or up.
Rape, no matter how vague, will always earn a 5 and up, as will murder.
Graphic gore, such as entrails or amputation, will get a 6 and up.
Anything above a 6 will likely be one of the above only more graphic, disturbing, and/or in larger quantities.
Sexuality
Mostly my rating of this category has to do with what made me uncomfortable, which was generally anything above a 6, but now I shall try to be more specific. I have only ever read one book that I would rate a ten, and I had no idea that it would be so full of sex when I picked it up.
1 and 2 mean that there is practically no sexuality, only mild innuendo or a brief reference.
3. Some innuendo and multiple references.
4. A scene of sexuality that fades away before anything happens, but you still know what happened.
5. A scene that gets to the touching stage (but not the touching of certain body parts) before it fades away.
6. A scene that doesn't fade away but is still rather vague.
7. One descriptive scene.
8. Multiple scenes of varying explicitness.
9. One or two disturbingly graphic scenes.
10. Many graphic scenes throughout the novel.
Any ratings that do not seem to match up with what I have listed above, for example, a rating of a 4 in sexuality for references only, means that there are more references or worse references than I would rat a 3. I hope this is useful to you in understanding my ratings, I know it will be useful to me :) I think I might have to go adjust some of my previous ratings...
Lieder Madchen
Lieder,
ReplyDeleteThat was quick, but it does make things more clear. Although I have to admit I liked when you commented before that you kind of did some of the ratings based on whether or not a book was suitable for one of your siblings, based on their ages. I don't know how other bloggers do it but they provide a permanent link or button in their sidebar to their ratings to help new readers who come along at any point in the future.
Hope I don't confuse you by continuing on from comments made in your Lauren Willig review and Q&A. I hope you weren't too jealous about my meeting Willig and Raybourn ;o). Don't know if you know about this but Passages to the Past blog, hosted by Amy, will be hosting an author chat with Lauren on 2/17. I've never done one but I hope to check this one out.
I was curious what you meant by the following "As for running the blog, I think the hardest thing is to make everything different from everything else", when I asked about your expectations running a blog. Did you mean each of your posts or your blog in general?
I don't even know how to go about starting a blog. I want to join and be able to track progress of challenges and have reviews all in one place. I asked other bloggers and they didn't know of any sites where I could do that nor have I found a blog where I could participate. I had a brain injury years ago and one of things I had to learn was how to read. Doing the reviews, which I started last year, helps in strengthening my reading comprehension. Seeing you had recently started your blog is what lead me to ask you those questions. Plus, I was impressed with your intelligence, compassion, appreciation of family and all at your young age!
Hmm, I will have to look into a permanent place for ratings. I have also seen people put up a simplified version of ratings on their sidebar.
ReplyDeleteThe author chat sounds interesting, thanks for the heads up. :)
By "everything different from everything else" I mostly meant the posts. If I like a book, I tend to use a lot of the same terms and adjectives in describing why I liked it, but I want to make the reviews sound different. I have always loved words, so it should be fun to see what I can find in the future.
I haven't heard of a site where you can have everything in one place like you describe, there are some things that I think could be better about this site, but all-in-all I find it easy to use. It works well for what I am doing, but I can see where you might want something different.
Good Luck!
Lieder Madchen