What exactly is emotional rating? Well, according to Summer's Very Important and Very Accurate Dictionary, it's done by book reviewers when all reason is thrown to the wind and emotion is trusted to assign a book a rating.
There's two scenarios: one, a book that you know has bad writing, bad characterization, etc, but you follow what the book made you feel and bestow upon it a 5-star rating. Or, on the other hand, you know a book has a great plot and the writing is amazing but there's that one character that grinds your gears and makes you so angry that you had to give the book 1 star.
While I do do this (quite a lot, actually) in my defense I usually state in my review the goods and the bads regardless of my feelings about the book overall. With that said, I don't bother with reviews for a lot of the non-review books I read, so I wouldn't trust those if I were you. :3
I know that it's my blog and my reviews and there's really no need to justify my ratings, but I do try to be professional (to an extent) and I *try* to be as fair as possible most of the time, especially when I'm reviewing an ARC. Also, I'm not suggesting that if you're not "fair" then your opinions are invalid, I'm merely throwing around some food for thought.
As I think about this topic more I realize that emotional rating isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes as a book reviewer I get tired of analyzing every little thing in a book and I just want to read to calm my brain. There's nothing wrong with giving a book 1 star just because a character is unlikable (but IMO this is pushing it and if a reviewer is doing that I probably won't trust their opinion.) However, I have no right to say that their style of reviewing is "wrong" as if there is a "correct" way to review.
What do you guys think? Yay or nay for emotional rating?
And, because I feel like I'm way too serious in this discussion post, here's some breaking news if you were interested:
hehehehheheehe.