“Once upon a time,” This is perhaps one of the most famous phrases in the English language. One will often find that the eyes of a child or an adult who still is a child at heart, lighten up with excitement when he or she hears this phrase that is the typical opening for a story.
Stories, on the one hand, are the descriptions for a sequence of related events, told either verbally, via written text with or without accompanying imagery, or through films and documentaries.
On the one hand, are fictitious stories, the products of an author’s imagination, with fire breathing dragons, serial killers, love triangles, or anthropomorphized animals. The main genres of fiction are romance, crime, horror, historical fiction, and fantasy, with several sub-genres. Stories not borne from imagination and are at the end of the spectrum are actual, verifiable events that happened or are happening to real people, alive or dead. Non-fiction stories come in the form of biographies, memoirs, and essays, and they aim to either reveal a truth, resolve a controversy, or to provide an alternate perspective to an issue, to educate and inform or to demystify an intriguing character.
When a person writes an account of his/her own life, such an account is an autobiography. In contrast, a biography is an account of a person’s life written by another individual who, in most cases, is a close relative of the Subject of the story. A memoir is much like an autobiography; the difference is that a memoir details only specific memories from an individual’s life; it is not an account of a person’s entire life. As a result, a person may have several memoirs, each one chronicling different epochs in his/her life. The author of a memoir is referred to as a memoirist.
Reviews are Stories
A review is an assessment of a product, a person, or a service. It aims to effect change if necessary, as well as to educate potential clients. Reviews are not the products of an imaginative mind; a review is factual. Its basis is the experiences the reviewer has had with the product, person, or service in question. As a consequence, reviews will only hold water when the reviewer is the same person as the one whose experiences and opinions are propounded.
Reviews are stories. But for technicality, the argument goes thus; whoever gives a review is a reviewer. A reviewer is a memoirist, and a review is a memoir as it conforms with all that makes a memoir a memoir; it is a personal account of memories of a period in an individual’s life, and it aims to demystify, inform and educate, reveal a truth, and provide alternate perspectives.
In retrospect, a story describes an event or a sequence of related events. Ipso facto, a review does the same thing; it describes the event of interacting with the product, person, or service under review, and thus is it established that a review is also a story.