Talk:Cancer (constellation)

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Humour: 7 Ah, humour. So important, and such a ruddy pain to poke, but fortunately this article does not lack humour. It could use more, perhaps, but as could most. Overall it becomes more a matter of better defining and emphasising and effecting what is there.

In the introduction, well, the intro serves its purpose well enough, but the individual sentences are a mite odd. It seems like some are strangely redundant with each other or themselves or... something. It quickly gets to the point of the cancer joke, at any rate, which is good. I like the bit about it going on to infect the ones around it... shame there isn't more later on this subject.

  • Stars - No life, though? I always took cancer for the opposite - too much life, to the point where it causes its own demise like a pile of uncontrolled moose multiplying until they surpass the capacity of their locale, at which point they all starve and die. Or something. Although this could be modeling the aftermath of whatever life there was killing itself off, just as easily, I suppose.
While the meanings are a lovely start, I cannot help but think maybe they would do better with some sort of histories - why are they called after those things specifically? And the coughing and the lymph nodes, the names to which they are attributed are a mite similar, yet the translations have nothing in common.
All of the stars that make up Cancer are fairly dim. In fact they are among the dimmest stars in the night sky. - it's just choppy. And often too late for what?
Charitable company? Or organisation? Well, either way, what can they possibly hope to do against this? Is there any hope? Why would people contribute? Why is there a thing soliciting for contributions on an encyclopedia at all?
  • Representations - There's at least one comma splice in here. But that's not the point. How would traditional art depict cells lacking a gene? Maybe if you emphasized how silly this is it would work better, but for now it's bordering on just confusing.
Interestingly? Is this interesting? To whom? Who is the audience? Are folks reading this for the interest or for the fear of the expanding, infectious constellation or for the fact that a company/organisation is guilt-tripping them?
  • Mythology - I rather like this section... myths can be quite fun with their little truths and convoluted retellings. Literally battling trauma certainly sounds interesting, though.
  • Astrology - Interesting traits, although again... why negative? Cancer grows; it doesn't stunt. It grows too much and that's the problem. Self-growth certainly sounds useful, though.
Not real? Is this article not entirely about an astrological thingy?
  • Cancer, the unrelated disease - Why is this even here? It even says it's unrelated in the header and when the subject was originally introduced at the beginning. So if it is unrelated, why? The article is on Cancer (constellation) specifically; would the unrelated disease not go on another page, perhaps with a see also link? It is just misinformation, and while the second paragraph is rather amusing, I'm just not seeing how the section belongs.
At very least it is introduced at the beginning, though, and doesn't come entirely out of the blue. But still... something so off topic cannot make for a particularity strong conclusion. Something more overarching and universal to the topic would go better here, probably. Or something climactic. Perhaps metastasis or some such of some great star-tumour thing that folks had written off as vanquished...
For that matter, some sort of progression and climax might do this article some good. Or maybe not, but it might be something to consider.
Concept: 6 Cancer as cancer... literal interpretations of thing can certainly be odd enough. Anyhow, as an idea it has much potential, some of which is achieved, even then some, and some... not so much. But I suppose this is probably mostly reiteration of whatever I'll have said in the humour section. I'm writing this backwards for some reason, though, so I'm not actually sure. Really not sure why, either.

But it also seems to me that a lot of this is just repetition with little, shall I say, depth to it - Cancer is cancerous. Cancer infects stars. Cancer was named after cancer. Cancer looks like cancer. Only when Hera attempts to use Cancer on Heracles does more depth of the literalism or metaphor or whatever this sort of thing should be called come out. It is the latter option - Cancer attacks the guy, but is defeated, not unlike how the local woman apparently defeated cancer some years later. Yet Chemo, god who did the defeating, his damage here does well to reinforce the idea of this thing, adding depth. And Palliative cleans up after that...

Prose and formatting: 5 Tone consistency seems to be your main issue here, perhaps along with sentence fluency. Fortunately the latter should be solved simply enough as a side effect of fixing other issues and a proofread, probably. At any rate, check sentence transitions and how the article presents itself from section to section - if they don't fit together well, not a good sign. It seems to go from a choppy but rather technical definition to being almost conversational at times, which is not helped by the rather sudden change in direction to using the second person on two of the sections after the professionalism of the directly preceding ones.

And as I already mentioned, you'll also probably want to give this a proofread in general. Watch your its and it's, your commas and whatnot... and possibly some other stuff, but that's most of what I noticed. Anyhow, it should help the read too. I know I keep tripping over that one 'it's' every time I pass it...

Images: 6 The first two images tie well to the idea of Cancer being cancerous, between what they are and their captions. They bring the two sides together, and all the better that one operates in one direction, starting with the cells as the image with the caption relating it, and the other the other way around. The problem is that they are not overly funny - the frightening discolouration made me smile, but the second especially does little more than inform. If you could add something more to bring out potential humour of the constellation image, perhaps how it resembles said cells or some other commentary, it would help.

The last image just feels entirely out of place, even with the section there (which also feels out of place to me). It just seems almost as if the section was wrote just for an excuse to pull in a guy clutching at his balls, save for the fact that the section never mentions anything these literal cancerous crabs going for one's testes in the first place. Either tie this in somehow and justify the image's presence (and the section would need to seem less out of place as well for this), or you should really just remove it altogether. Replace it with something more applicable.

Miscellaneous: 6 It's a number, resultant of careful consideration and vague estimation of what an average could be in an entirely integer world. Also, I have no idea how to actually average things. Don't hurt me.
Final Score: 30 This may be a strange way to put it, but I tried to find as many faults as I could with this so that perhaps you would have that many more things to approach... unless you disagree with them, in which case I suppose you'll probably just ignore them, but that's not really the point. Maybe this'll make it more of use, though, to result in a better article thingie. Or something.

Anyhoo, hopefully this helps. Good luck and sweet Nightmares; the madman is gnawing on my head again and I must depart.

Reviewer: ~ Pointy.png (talk) (stalk) -- 20100828 - 07:57 (UTC)


Translation[edit source]

I liked this article very much, therefore I did a translation to German (see interwiki). The funny thing is that all the wordplay works just as fine in German. NaturalBornKieler (talk) Germany Flag 1.png 10:01, November 3, 2010 (UTC)

That's awesome. I wish I could read German. --Black Flamingo 10:17, November 3, 2010 (UTC)