Why I Write Reviews

Some of my friends ask me: Why do you write reviews? To me, the answer to that question is simple. I write reviews because I enjoy doing it. But the reason goes deeper than that. It's been a long and winding journey for the past six or so years.

## Note-taking

Ever since junior high school, I've always enjoyed writing about anything. Whether it's an assignment or writing a guide for someone else, I've always loved the fact that I can be thorough in the way I express myself to others. That's right. To me, writing is just another way of communicating myself to others or myself in the future. I think it's beautiful that what we write can transcend barriers like that.

Anyways, moving on from the philosophy, I eventually "upgraded" my love for writing during my senior high school years. At around the middle of 10th grade, I ditched note-taking by hand and pivoted to writing by typing. A lot of factors compounded to that decision, like my hands hurting when writing, the speed of my typing compared to handwriting, and the fact that it's so much easier to just press backspace. With all of those excuses, the decision I made was easy to take.

Eventually, the benefits started revealing themselves. Because I typed way faster than I handwrote, I could pay attention more in class. At home or on break, I could write even more comprehensive notes. There's probably also a positive correlation with my grades. Maybe it's nerdy for me to say, but I actually started to enjoy the learning experience at school, too. Whether that's due to me typing or loving writing in general, I don't know. But there was undoubtedly an effect.

If you're wondering what I used to take notes, I used the app called Obsidian. Maybe some people would be better off using Notion or something else, but the simplicity of Obsidian really helped me not obsess much with optimizing the structure of my writing. It's really just an app where you're able to take Markdown notes with a folder structure. Other than that, if you're wondering how I wrote equations for math and chemistry, Obsidian also has support for LaTeX, which really helped me in 11th and 12th grade. By the time I had finished school, I probably had around 50 separate notes. That sounds like so little, but some notes could span 20 A4 pages. I really like writing on Obsidian. Highly recommended.

## Journaling

During the 4th semester, I started journaling. I don't know why I felt like starting a journal, though, so I won't talk about that. I will talk about my experience, though.

I started journaling using an app called Standard Notes. As expected, it's just a note-taking app which met all of my criteria of being a good journaling app. Basically, it had date and time timestamps for the notes, it had desktop-mobile sync, and it could be encrypted, which was highly important for me. I started by journaling every day. But now, after more than a year of journaling I only journal when I feel like it. I think it's a healthy habit to journal, but it's hard to write something when you have nothing to talk about. At some point you really pour your entire mind into the notes.

I completely get if comprehensive note-taking isn't for everyone, but I genuinely do think a lot of people can get into journaling. I find it to be weirdly therapeutic to write all my worries, concerns, and random thoughts away right before I sleep. All of this is anecdotal and biased, but I think I started being more mindful, kind, and chill in general. I think even my sleep quality got better. I don't know if that would happen to anyone else, though. I think to journal properly, you really need to be serious about writing everything you think about. Dear Reader, you should consider journaling.

## Reviewing

Finally, the part mentioned in the title of this post. Reviewing isn't the latest "thing" I started doing, but I think it's my favorite thing I started doing. I started reviewing the media I watched probably a few months before I started journaling, but I didn't really take it seriously. I just wrote a few paragraphs what I thought about the games I played or the movies I watched, and that's it. Nothing much, but it wasn't really substantial. Because of that, I eventually quit writing reviews altogether during the start of 2025.

Then, I started watching anime (series) at the middle of November 2025. That's a long story on its own, but to keep it short I watched animes with premises that wouldn't ever attract me if it were live-action. Eventually, because the stuff I watched was so "new" to me, I returned to writing reviews. It started with a couple paragraphs and a rating, then it evolved into my personal form of reviewing, with "metrics" like Quality, Enjoyment, and Impact. Finally, now I've written 45 or so reviews. That's a lot!

To me, the main reason I write reviews isn't to write for someone else (that's an added benefit). The main reason I write reviews is to fully digest how I feel after watching a certain piece of media. I find it really helps to write down everything about how I felt watching a certain series or movie. If I don't write, I feel like it's hard for me to fully understand how I feel, if that makes sense. Writing just exposes everything that's bottled up in my mind. Even if I sometimes write something that I don't resonate with, when I read it back there's such a visceral "wrongness" feeling in my head that tells me to rewrite it. That's why I only write my true feelings.

I think writing reviews has also helped me improve my writing a lot. At least to me, a lot of the stuff I write in reviews is structurally sound. By contrast, my experience with journaling was just writing random sentences that might make sense together. I think there's something different in writing for somebody else versus writing for nobody. At least, that's what I try to do! Sometimes it's hard to convey how a scene or plot point felt to me, and those challenges really help me to become a better writer in general. Overall, I owe a lot of my current writing skills to reviewing.

## The Conclusion?

I think if you, The Reader, even remotely like writing, you should start doing so. It's something easy to start, and there are so many prompts out there. Maybe you'll start by reviewing, journaling, ghostwriting, making videos on YouTube, or whatever. I think there's something special and beautiful about writing. Maybe that's just because I enjoy it, I don't know. If you don't find it fun you can just quit, anyway. Good luck.