Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:I sneezed

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UnNews:I sneezed

02:42, January 12, 2011 (UTC)

Just fixed up some grammar issues, hope you don't mind. Sir Oliphaunte (განხილვა)   04:24, January 12, 2011 (UTC)

Not at all! Thank you. -- 15:16, January 12, 2011 (UTC)

Mmmkay, time to be blunt. I shall make my words and say my point! Or rather, I shall... wait, what? Feh, you know what I mean. I guess. 1234 ~ 04:44, 18 January 2011

Humour:	4	I'm still not seeing it. There just is not a lot here to be funny - past the irony that it is labeled as news while neither reading like news nor concerning a newsy topic, there seem to be almost no jokes, and since the frame of 'news' falls apart so quickly, there is also little to no overall parody of actual news. I don't like to say this, but it verges into the realm of stupid, and there is a reason HTBFANJS is called what it is, and it is indeed laid out for a reason. I could rewrite a large hunk of it to apply it to your article, but I expect you're familiar enough with it as it is. The first thing that strikes me is the inconsistent grammar; it is something I tend to pay attention to more than most, yes, but immediately my expectations are lowered. ' 'Me was eating'. Me is 23. Me reports for UnNews about nonsensical events that nobody cares about. And what is it even saying? Why would I continue reading? Why should I care? Doesn't seem particularly interesting, doesn't seem to have any relevance or reference to anything, or even some sort of point. Not even making fun of anything that I can tell, so nothing holds my interest. It also doesn't make sense - 23, writing like that, in your parents' basement, and a reporter? Who works at McDonalds? That it goes on about the shirt being highly important could have been something to play on more, but it is just a shirt. It ends saying it is just a shirt, so any potential that had about it just duds, same as the article as a whole, after a fair bit of jumping around the sneeze without any change in tone or apparent caring for the thing. Kip's sort of works because it does change tone, because there is a build up - the narrator freaks out, becomes more freaked out; it actually contains a progression of events that progress before the... oh, nevermind. False alarm. But unlike Kip's genitals, this doesn't have that - it talks about a sneeze. It talks about covering it. It talks about a shirt, an irate mother - and you do realise not all mums are like that, right? Such stereotypical portrayal only adds to the overall flatness of the piece; it is not even well-written. Kip spent time on his, was working on it for a few days before copying it into the newsspace, getting it right, building it up, messing with the folks around, etc, but the effort shows in the overall quality and readability of the piece. This, I have a hard time believing you spent more than a few minutes on it, between the fragmented nature of the piece, the problematic sentence structure, flatness, the complete randomness of the topic and the events therein, and the apparent lack of effort to make individual jokes or references, let alone parody anything, Thing is, articles and whatnot that defy a norm and thus stand out as good despite that... or perhaps for it, they tend to have something else in common - whatever they're doing, they still need to be good in at least some general terms. Take for instance I eat my own shit as another example - it's grammatically correct. It follows a logical procession as it tells its story. I don't like it in the slightest, but it works, in its own way. It's believable, in a way, describing details that seem natural given what's going on and not just playing against expectations, but into them as well, and being all the more horrible for it, and to those who like it, all the more funny, I suspect. I'll say this time and time again, but you need to have balance to pull such things off. This just doesn't have that, and thus thus your angle is unclear. Thus I don't see why this is funny. And you know what they say... "Coherence is like a horse, and funny is like a cart."
Concept:	2	It's a guy sneezing. Huh? Why is this funny? You need an angle to approach things, mon, some direction from which to hit a topic, some overall joke that actually pokes fun at something, and the people can tell what it is. That is some essence of parody, and this is a place of parody...
Prose and formatting:	4	I was kind of hoping Oliphaunte's having fixed some grammar issues was in error and that he actually had no idea what he was doing, but unfortunately, he did. The errors it still has are what got past him. Disconnected phrases ('Splattering snot all over the sleeve of my shirt.') generally only work if they mirror part of the structure of the preceding sentence while not being directly appendable with, say, a comma. This one should be connected with a comma, as it is not a parallel but a direct continuation of what precedes it. 'Me was eating'... the 23 does not alter the structure of the sentence around it; that is why it is in commas. 'Me was' is just bad grammar. 'When all of a sudden, I got this feeling in my nose' - again, should be part of the preceding sentence; it's just a continuation on the same thought. Use a comma. On the other hand, it doesn't actually need a comma after 'My beer was running low'... 'I was instead, going to sneeze.' - extra comma; that is one clause and there is subsequently no syntactical reason for a comma. If you are trying to emphasise spacing, use an ellipsis (...) or something. I tend to overuse the things, myself... 'to "cover my cough" As' - since that is part of the same sentence, the as should not be capitalised... although that may be because Oliphaunte fixed something... or not. It should, however, have a comma there, as you are shifting from saying what happened to saying why - separate the ideas. Dialogue deserves a new paragraph in general. 'I never expected anything like this to happen' bit, however, goes in a new direction, idea-wise, anyway, and thus should have a new paragraph anyway. Say when things happen and they will seem less random - I don't mean time-wise, but in relation to each other - when the guy claims to have to 'take a piss,' was this suddenly? Immediately after saying the shirt would be missed? As a general rule, starting sentences with 'and' is bad. I'll just say you should just not do it until you get a grasp of when it does work because I can't figure out any good way to explain it. Mom was quoted by whom? And do you talk to yourself? Again, context... just random as it is and loses believability. Punctuation in quotes only remains the same if it does not affect the punctuation of the parent sentence, as it replaces said parent punctuation - if the sentence ends with a quote, the gotta wash." is the end of both sentence and quote. Punctuation goes within the quote marky-things. Keep the tense consistent - is this past or present? 'Everyone' is one word in all of the dialects of English with which I am familiar. But this is UnNews. You do not have the opportunity to sit around and wait for other people to fix it, or to hail the comma brigade or what have you. UnNews is not be a place to put out a draft before it is even done, because unlike the other namespaces, hit 'save' with an UnNews, and it shows up on the UnNews mainpage immediately, and in a week or so, it is gone, anyway. Old news. Need to get things right in the first place. Spend a little more time on them before hitting save, and actually go through them again yourself, proofread them, read them out loud if need be, for folks will be seeing them rather immediately as well. There is no room for ICU because of that, and little room to come back to the things. Pee reviews are equally useless for the articles in question for the time they tend to take - only purpose usually is to get a feel for what to do next time... or perhaps what not to do. If you cannot get an UnNews right in the first place, however, or if you do need proofreading or want a review you can actually use on the article for which it was requested, create it in your userspace. You can have all the time in the world to work on the article there, so long as the subject itself doesn't pass by too quickly. Then just copy the contents into a new UnNews page (don't just move it; the thing goes by page creation date) and it will show up as a new news. Also, you should really (re)read the Style Guide. It wasn't written to sit around being pretty, and actually was written by news folks, so it may be of more specific help; I ain't a news person. I just follow one around sometimes, snickering.
Images:	4	So, er... why do you have a picture of it? And if you got it all over your clothes, why is the guy in the image sneezing out into the air? If it was labeled as clip-art or 'an artist's interpretation' or some such, that would make more sense. Say it was gross, and more more than the picture shows, that would work, but it has to make some sense to be funny. Confusion only gets one so far, unless you actually play off it - perhaps actually say that it was an image of it when it clearly isn't, and exaggerate how the photographers crowded around trying to get the best shots and whatnot, that kind of thing? It's something that might happen in a real situation of actual importance, and approaching it thusly would make the thing funnier. An angle.
Miscellaneous:	3	As you may have noticed, I'm not exactly a fan of this. But have a number. This may seem odd, but a general comment - 'I felt like it' is rarely sufficient reason for anything here, in of itself, regardless of what people say. There are usually other reasons. If it was enough as the only one, Chief would not be so after the destruction of one of my poor articles... Okay, I admit - that one even confused the ?pedians. But still... ...things need reasons.
Final Score:	17	I'll be honest - I considered just taking this back to VFD now that the whole hatery against non-newsy stuff drama had worn down a bit, but then I discovered that it's still not quite old enough for that. So now you have your review... it is blunt, it tries to explain my problems with it, and perhaps it will even help in the future. I'unno. Best of luck to you, at any rate. In other news, you'll be wanting to read the welcome from the Chief again - SPIKE has made his position official and rewritten some of the documentation, perhaps in some part in reaction to this. I suspect one section in particular might be of interest as it does apply, here... know it for future reference. After all, he is the Chief.
Reviewer:	1234 ~ 08:04, 18 January 2011