Just curious, as I know everyone have their own ways of reviewing. For me, most of my reviews take two or more hours. No wonder my parents yell at me for being on the computer too much I never get out of the house, can't you tell? So how about you? What's your overall time of wasting on reviews?
Not including the reading? Usually about 20-30 minutes. I wish I had enough knowledge to be able to write more than that in a critique. Do your crits really take over 2 hours to write? Wow, that's impressive, or do you just type really slowly?
It depends on the piece. If a quick scan reveals a couple glaring issues right away, I may get a review out in 10-15 minutes. Something really quick, I can possibly do it all in 5 minutes. But usually I need to sit down and allow a good half an hour to an hour to read it through, let it sink in, then reread it again to focus on the biggest areas of improvement, then 15-30 minutes to write it up. The thing is this though - I'll probably read the whole piece, or the whole chapter if it's from a novel (but I rarely review more than a single chapter). But the review itself usually ends up focusing only on the opening paragraphs, or some small number of paragraphs. I'm not there to edit the piece, or to give a comprehensive laundry list for the writer to mechanically apply. I'm there to try to find where the writer can get the most bang for his or her buck in (hopefully) improving the piece. I have to assume that the writer can extrapolate, and apply similar fixes throughout if needed, and that the next piece he or she writes will try to apply the "lesson" if it is useful.
It either takes me at least a half hour, or less than ten minutes. It depends how much I care and how much I think I can do for the story. I do nitpicky crits if I think the story has hope, or make general comments otherwise. Nitpicky takes a long time. I hope it's worth it.
*smack* I type fast, darn you! XD Like MS stated, nitpicky takes a long time. I think it is worth it, because by pointing out someone's mistakes in their work, I realize I shouldn't do that in my own. You know how you always seem to be better at critting someone else's work than you own. Cogito, I know what you mean. Every time I read a piece, my eyes stop at every single mistake, making it hard for me to do a whole read-through before critting. I'm a nitpicky bugger *sigh*
Kaij--definatly! Part of the reason I did so well at English on my ACT was because I copyedited for many other people. And I have the same problem with reading the whole thing at once. It gets harder and harder to turn my inner nitpicker off...
