Do consumer critics write differently from professional critics? A genre analysis of online film reviews

Consumers often base their choices to purchase experience goods like movies on online reviews. These reviews can be written by professional critics or by other consumers. However, little is known on the issue how the texts written by these two groups of reviewers differ. To answer this question, we conducted a genre analysis of online film reviews by analyzing and comparing the moves and strategies in online film reviews written by professional and consumer critics. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses show that these two groups of texts differ: Consumer critics mainly evaluate the movies and mostly write from a personal perspective. In contrast, reviews written by professional critics describe the movie instead of evaluating it. These results show that online reviews written by professional and consumer critics differ in terms of content which may have important implications for discourse on the Internet.