The impact of language formality on review helpfulness across online platforms

Purpose To date, a broad range of factors have been linked with review helpfulness, such as star rating, rating extremity and review length, as well as linguistic features such as text complexity and readability. A hitherto unstudied linguistic style concept in relation to helpfulness of online reviews is text formality. Formal written text is precise, lucid, eloquent and persuasive, unlike informal text which is written in a style more akin to spoken conversation between friends. This study aims to show that text formality has a major influence on the perceived helpfulness of online reviews, more so than text complexity and readability. Design/methodology/approach A Tobit model is used to assess the relative importance of text formality, complexity and readability, as well as to control for a range of factors known to influence review helpfulness. Findings Text formality has higher relative importance at driving helpfulness votes than either of text complexity or readability. However, too much formality can reduce the number of helpfulness votes, thereby creating a curvilinear effect. Research limitations/implications The context is limited to two experiential products, movies and books. Practical implications Amazon movie and book reviews already have about the right level of text formality, while Google movie reviews and LibraryThing book reviews need to increase their formality. Review platforms can provide review writers with a formality score to enable them to obtain more helpfulness votes. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply an arithmetic measure of text formality to online reviews. The authors also contrast the effect of text linguistic features for the same movies or books across two platforms, a type of analysis not yet considered in the literature.