Was this analysis helpful? A genre analysis of the Amazon.com discourse community and its “most helpful” product reviews

• Compared positive and critical Amazon.com “most helpful” customer reviews.
• Significant difference found in frequency of rhetorical moves between review types.
• Despite differences, both review types ultimately provide experience-based (new) information.
• Experience-based (new) information is desired by the Amazon.com discourse community.
• Reviews that contain similar rhetorical features of advertisements may not be desired by the Amazon.com discourse community.

The purpose of this paper is to present a descriptive analysis of Amazon.com product reviews that have been rated as “most helpful” by the Amazon.com discourse community in an attempt to discover if the shared values of the community are reflected in this specific genre. Drawing on genre theory and corpus-based discourse analysis, I detail the rhetorical patterns that exist in these reviews by analyzing a corpus of 142 “most helpful positive” and “most helpful critical” product reviews. A comparison of the results indicates that differences exist in the rhetorical patterning of positive and critical reviews. To reconcile this difference, I put forward a general argument that these differences still work towards the same overall communicative purpose of the genre, which is in turn a reflection of the shared values and goals of the Amazon.com discourse community. Product reviews that contain new or “experience” type information, as opposed to old or “search” (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010) type information are preferred by the Amazon.com discourse community. Concurrently, reviews that are similar to the “soft selling” form of advertisements (Cook, 1992), or reviews that are reminiscent of elements of “synthetic personalization” (Fairclough, 1989), are considered less helpful than reviews that focus on the author or product of the review.