I’ve stopped giving numbered and alphabet ratings as a critic and blogger.

When I was in college, I was always dreaming I would become a critic. I thought that was an occupation for rich people who went to a school like Harvard, or lived full time in. New York City, and I wanted to be one of those people.

Well, I ended up getting business degrees when I went to college, so it seemed far out of reach, but less than a year out of college, I was employed as a freelance film critic over at MovieWeb. I started this blog not too long after, and a good chunk of my income comes from reviewing and criticism.

Never did I think I would have this dream path, but here we are!

The more I dive into reviewing and criticism (and I think there are boundaries between the two—they are not the same at all), the more I realize how broken the rating system is.

Obviously I have to do it for the places I work for, as these are requirements, but if you click around on my blog, I stopped doing a rating system over two years ago now when writing this. I just can’t bring myself to number art and whatnot, and there are plenty of reasons why.

Let’s dive into why then, shall we?

Art isn’t meant to be interpreted one way, nor have a numeric value.

I find it completely and utterly unnatural to assign a numerical value to art. When you wander a museum, do you assign something a rating?

It makes me feel icky, and I don’t like to do it. I started realizing in high school English classes that I disagreed with the rigid ways we were interpreting the texts given to us, as art and how we consume it can really be a practice of semiotics.

How we see something is very ingrained in how we were raised, so someone from the US could interpret something completely differently than someone from Ethiopia.

That said, there are broader themes all the time, but there is never a right way for the reader or watcher to interpret something. By saying they did it wrong, or don’t understand a high rating, is extremely condescending and also a loaded statement, especially if the work is by a BIPOC person and the person saying this isn’t from that group (if an intimate experience).

Outside of all of the blogging and criticism work, I am someone who makes art myself. I would find it devastating if I found out people were ranking my work on a scale like this, diminishing something I poured my soul into under a neat little label like “8/10, would read again.”

Sure, good criticism is great and negative feedback can sting sometimes, but art isn’t really meant to be consumed in this way. Which leads me to my next point: biases. Keep reading for more on that.

Taste is extremely subjective and often a personal matter.

This ties heavily into the previous point and the concept of semiotics, but just because I like something doesn’t mean that you will like it. Everyone has their own curated sense of self, and in a time where people tend to just follow influencers they like, that can really direct you in a certain direction when it comes to what you consume.

Having spent a lot of time consuming content and thinking critically about, contextualizing things in a way academically, I’ve managed to create a sense of self that’s open-minded, but I know exactly what I like in a book.

That’s why I tend not to enjoy the TikTok books I see a lot of students carrying around—they tend to be romances with poor writing, and I tend to go for the opposite effect with my literature.

But that doesn’t mean I have good taste or a superior opinion—this is something people need to think about when they’re reading reviews. You need to get a holistic view from a diverse number of sources.

It becomes a reason someone won’t watch a movie or read a book.

I already touched on this already, too, but we’re in a time where critical thinking and media literacy are kind of in trouble. People have a tendency to not think for themselves, and I’ve noticed this a lot with the younger students in college I work with. There’s nothing wrong with what they like at all, but there’s a bit of a hive mentality.

They claim a book is really good before they’ve even read it because they see a bunch of influencers on TikTok talking about it, then they come out of the book reiterating the same points that are already being discussed by the people they watch online.

Again, nothing wrong with that, but it quickly can devolve into a reason why people won’t read or watch XYZ movie/book/televisions how. I’ve noticed how white a lot of these influencers are, and the books they tend to read are also really white.

We lock out entire groups of authors with a lack of visibility, and one bad review can really send someone down a spiral of their work never being read again.

It’s really unfortunate, which is why we need to champion writers, filmmakers, and actors who don’t have big platforms or ad spending platforms backing them.

Assigning numerical values only makes this problem worse, creating a cycle when people can’t confront their own biases or read outside of their usual genres.

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