Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Field of Cloth of Gold (specified Black Flamingo, will be delayed, OK'd by Cheifjustice
FIELD OF CLOTH OF GOLD[edit source]
Ohnogodnotagain 17:32, August 12, 2010 (UTC)
| Humour: | 6 | Hello Ohnogodnotagain, for a first article this is great. You should be proud, my early stuff was a lot worse than this. However, there are a couple of things that I feel you could do to improve it, and I will take you through these now.
Regarding the article as a whole, I feel you need to make more jokes. I'm not saying the article is humour-free or anything, you do treat the subject matter in a humorous way, but that's different from making actual jokes. There's a famous saying that comedy is basically talking about serious things in a silly way, or silly things in a serious way, but I don't think that's all it is. There's a difference between tone and actually making jokes. And what this article mostly does is talk about the incident in a slightly un-encyclopaedic and subjective way, without making many humorous remarks. For a good example of what I'm talking about, read Russo-Japanese War, an excellent article I read recently which takes a similar approach. Note how the article pretty much tells the story the way it actually happened (save for a few robot references) but with clever, mocking asides. Now you do already do this to some extent, but it would really help to see more. I will now take you through the article section by section, explaining what I think works and what could do with a slight revision. Hopefully this will help when it comes to adding more funny. Ok, the opening quotes - I'm not a big fan of these in general, and nor are the rest of the userbase (unless they're like, really, really, really good). I find they don't have much depth (and let's face it, they're not that encyclopaedic either, I've never seen one in a Wikipedia article). The joke itself isn't all bad, I just feel the format of the opening quote is inherently flawed (and also overdone). It also seems a little irrelevant to the subject matter. If you're bent on keeping it, why not try moving it into the main body of the text? Perhaps it could be something one of the characters could say. One of the key things you need to think about when it comes to writing jokes is making it unexpected. Something won't be anywhere near as funny if people see it coming. Let's use a joke from the first section, Initiation as an example - the joke about Henry swinging his sword around when he's bored. It's a nice idea, but you need to re-word it so people don't see the ending coming. Playing against reader's expectations is always the most effective (and easiest) way of making them laugh. So for this joke, perhaps start by referring to the fact that he's bored, then start to say something like "to pass the time, Henry would often swing his sword around in empty rooms - or failing that, full ones". While this isn't hilarious, I hope you can see my point. You're hitting the reader with something unexpected by waiting until the end of the sentence to make the joke, rather than just describing it throughout. In Preparation it might also be nice to go further with Henry's gold obsession. The "don't wear red" bit was kind of funny, and also consistent with the King's childish speech patterns, but at the same time I think it seems out of place. I'd rather see a gradual build up of his insane materialism - so you start off with saying everything should be gold and build up to something more unexpected like draping gold cloth over the corpses of the homeless. Or something like this. Like I've said, more jokes is the key here. Thw section on Wolsey is good, perhaps your strongest part. I really like the character development of him, it's subtle and clever but without being cliched. It would be good to see some more development of this nature with the other characters, like Henry and Francis - just a short paragraph about their backgrounds and what makes them tick. In the Preparation section you start to lose focus a bit. I think there's too much stuff in here, particularly since you're only really getting like, one or two jokes in per paragraph. A wiser user than me once said that if a sentence doesn't have a joke in it, or set a joke up, it has no place in an Uncyclopedia article. That's probably a bit harsh, but you get the point I'm trying to make. You need to trim the unecessary stuff. Sure, it's great to learn something from a comedy article, but that shouldn't be a priority over the humour. So in plain words: get rid of the stuff about Robert Fairfax. That whole interlude felt out of place and needless. Although I did really like the joke about the mummers being stoned, so perhaps you could work this into another section? Then, I also liked the stuff about the jousting and the competition-type things, but again I feel it could be trimmed down to just the jokes and set-ups for jokes, as it goes on a little too long. But it is funny. I really like the dark humour here, of buboes and accidental deaths being an everyday part of life back then. So if you're ever wondering what kind of jokes to make in your revisions - more of this would be great. With the end, the whole wrestling match is a decent idea, but the way it comes about seems a little forced. Perhaps taking it more simply, and just saying "while waiting, Henry grew bored and initiated an impromptu wrestling match". I really feel it should be Henry who starts it, as it's more in line with his character. Also, the whole set up for it seems overcomplicated, and boosts your word count a little more than it needs to. Ok, the Aftermath section is hit and miss. I really like the obscene "quotes" from Henry, but a lot of the text again goes on too long and is unclear. The first paragraph is fine, I understand that, but the second? I really couldn't figure out how Wolsey had engendered the King's envy. It also seemed a bit forced, having him get back into the King's good graces but then falling out again all within the same paragraph. Perhaps just keep it so the King stays mad at him, lose the big formal function in his honour, and just cut right to the part where he seizes Hampton Court Palace. Brevity is good. Then the stuff about Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn - get rid of that too. It doesn't add anything and isn't really even a joke. It might be true, but this isn't Wikipedia. Then I would also recommend jumping straight to Wosley's execution, leaving out the part about why he is a hated figure. We didn't really need to know that, all we need to know is that Henry was pissed off with him. This isn't a biography on Wolsey, this section is supposed to be an aftermath of the Field of Cloth of Gold incident - keep it focussed on that. And lastly, the Outcome section. A joke that kind of fails here is the one about obtuse laws. You say you can still use them to great effect in legal loopholes, but this on it's own isn't really funny. It would help hear an example of one of these laws, or how it can be used. The way it is now, it's like telling someone you have a really funny joke but then not telling them what it is. |
| Concept: | 7 | I've pretty much said everything I want to say here already. But just to summarise, I think your only real problem conceptually is brevity. You should always spend roughly the same amount of time taking things out of an article as putting things in. Not that it's not all good stuff, and sometimes it can be hard when you have an attachment to your work, but trust me, if you want to write a great article (and this can be) you're going to have to cut out the not-great stuff. So key things to remember are: say things in as fewer words as possible, be terse and clear when making jokes, don't overcomplicate your sentences, and get rid of stuff that doesn't really serve the humour or that isn't directly related to the article's subject matter. Apart from this you've done well. The article has a nice mix of the highbrow and the lowbrow, and the characterisation of the players is very well realised. I like your characterisation of Henry as 'really not giving a shit about anyone else'. The selfishness is so extreme it's almost frightening, and his relaxed attitude towards violence works very well. The only thing to look out for is keeping the tone right. For most of the article, the narration is plain and explanitory, while the King speaks in a very coarse and childish way. Every now and then, however, the tone of the narration seems to slip into the same voice used by the King (Eg. Where you say things like "everyone was bored shitless"). It would be best to keep all the voices in here consistent, so leave the swearing and vulgarity to Henry, and make your narrator a bit more encyclopaedic. |
| Prose and formatting: | 6 | Ok, your spelling and grammar is generally good. There aren't a large amount of mistakes, but it would still help to go through the text a few times, checking very closely for typpos. Or failing that, get the proofreading service to give it a look over. Your formatting is also pretty good, the only thing I would suggest is making your images a little larger. Though nicely arranged, they're all kind of small. Your first picture for example should be much larger. Take a look at our other pages and you'll see this is an accepted norm. There's no set perfect size here, but have a play around with different sizes and see which looks best.
There is a bit of a problem with clarity in your text, although not a major one. For the most part it's comprehensible, but I feel you're trying to make too many of your sentences overcomplicated. Just like with jokes, brevity is important when it comes to prose too. Try and simplify everything. Your opening sentence for instance, starts: "Europe in the 16th Century" then you add a colon and go into a description. This is a bit clumsy. Try to make it a statement, along the lines of: "Europe was a turbulent place in the 16th Century, it was a time of etc etc". It's not that you can't understand the text, but on occasion you have to go back and read it again because the sentences are arranged in such off-kilter ways, and this ruins the flow. There's a line in the Preparation section which typifies this, where Francis ponders "the wisdom of obsessive competitiveness and an over-zealous combat technique". I wasn't really sure what you meant by this. I figured it was supposed to be some kind of dig at Henry, but that's a guess. Again I think you might be being too wordy. Say it in as few words as possible. Another problem you have along these lines is trying to cram too many commas in. I was guilty of this too in my earlier writings, and I think the reason I used to do it was because I wanted to try and set a sort of pace. My advice would be not to worry about that. The best way to gather pace in a comedy article is probably to make lots of jokes, rather than have lots of long, complex sentences with too many clauses. So try to trim these back a bit. I believe the guideline is: one comma if the sentence is made up of three or more things. Just two things doesn't need a comma, you can probaly just use "and", "or" or "but" etc. |
| Images: | 6 | Your images are ok, like I said they could do with resizing, but generally they're fine. My advice in the Humour section of this review might help you when it comes to reworking your captions, however. The way they are now, they don't really make any new jokes. While again this isn't a major problem, captions are a great way of getting more jokes in, so have a go at this. At the moment it kind of looks like you need more images, but I reckon that if you trim down the text as I suggest, there will be a lot less space between them so you may be ok here. But if you do need another one or two, something similar to the nice paintings they have in the Wikipedia version of the article might work. Although I imagine you already considered this, and I suppose it would be hard to think of a funny caption for them.
Also, while I do like the silly pictures of Henry and Wolsey, I'm not sure if they fit here. If the narrator was a child or something it might work, but this narrator seems well informed and the two concepts clash somewhat. This is another idea why ordinary paintings from the era might work better. Still, it's up to you, if you can't come up with anything else they're not exactly terrible. |
| Miscellaneous: | 6.3 | The average of my above scores. Another quick note since it's your first review: don't pay too much attention to the numbers. I've always found you can't quantify something like funniness. For me they're just a loose measure of how much work the article still needs. |
| Final Score: | 31.3 | So the aforementioned issues with brevity, clarity and joke-ratio aside, you've done a fine job here. It's probably one of the best first articles I've read, and I hope you continue to put such effort in here and around the site in general. Some small edits could really help make this article great, but don't feel like you have to do everything I suggest. Use your own judgement and feel free to seek advice from other users too, ultimately these are just my opinions. If you would like any further help please contact me. Good luck. |
| Reviewer: | --Black Flamingo 08:42, August 14, 2010 (UTC) | |