UnBooks talk:Dissonance: A Gripping Tale of Love and Betrayal

Pee Review

Humour:	5	Right, there is some humour here and I feel that it is just out of reach of the reader, I got the impression that it was intended to be a punchy satire of a book genre, there are some problems that are undermining you here which I would recommend that you take a look at. The first thing that struck me upon finishing the article was that it is very difficult for the reader to get into the article. What I mean by this is that the article didn't grip me nor did it ever seem believable, perhaps this is the idea you were going for but I think that you need to reconsider it. You state in your preamble that the author has a tendency to write in a way that is very unaccommodating for those who haven't read the preceding work, this warning certainly rings true in your text. Perhaps I am missing something here but it seemed to me that by starting the narrative of the novel in the way that you have you have given us no reason to dislike or like any of the characters more than the others and as I read through and the characters began dying like hedgehogs on a dual-carriageway I rapidly came to the conclusion that I wasn't supposed to care. If we proceed from this point I am finding it hard to extract much comedy from the work, I realise you intend the article to be poor but what you need to remember is that people still have to read through it and the humour of something being utterly terrible only stretches so far. Permit me to explain, if you consider the reasons we laugh at things that are really bad, part of it is the shock value and another part is because we feel embarrassed for the person or are simply anticipating the reaction that people will have to them, and I found it hard to apply much of this logic to your article. The reason I had such difficulty finding it to be bad is that it isn't horrendous enough, certainly the story has gaping holes in it and the characters are shallow and die very quickly but it seemed to me that how bad it was wasn't comical enough, the very best part of your article for me was where you say "The cop cars' glaring lights resounded in the night, lighting up the dark city streets. Catherine crashed. The end." I found this funny because it is abrupt and completely dead-ends the entire story, in a similar way to ending a story with "Then I woke up and it was all a dream", the way you used this idea was amusing. The rest of the narrative seemed to me to be poor but exactly the type of thing I have seen inserted into articles by IP's so I had trouble finding it to be amusingly bad; this is obviously a risk you take when you write an article to be deliberately poor. However, what you have done is made a good start, what I think you need to add to this is a way to communicate a much more comical way of having the characters interact, for instance instead of having the characters have normal motives try just making them horrible for the sake of it, the character James seems to be a good candidate for such an idea, he is being horrible at the start, but by giving him a motive this gives a reason to it and while still an immoral thing to be doing, leaving Catherine seems a logical progression. I realise that what I have written there is quite in-depth, so I will do my best to summarise for you: The article definitely has its moments and the satire I think you are aiming for is nearly achieved throughout the article, it is held back by the novel not being bad enough, you really build up the poor quality of this authors work in the preamble and then when the reader actually gets to it the work is obviously poor but not poor enough to inspire the satire I think you are aiming for. My overall recommendation would simply be to over-exaggerate things a bit more, make things as obviously over-dramatic as you think is necessary and I think the article will be much more amusing because of it. Your reactions section is OK, you just need to contrast it more effectively with the text, if you have a look at what the author does in the preamble here, it is funny because it recognises the poor quality of the product while keeping the narrative neutral, I suggest you have a look at both this and the article in general as it is doing a similar thing to you.
Concept:	7	I think that the idea you use here is very good and I do have a particular liking for this type of satire. I am interested to see how you develop it further as to me it felt as though you were pushing at the boundaries of excellent satire, but not quite reaching it. The tone is generally appropriate though I would recommend you try to be a bit more implicit with your references, I'm not suggesting you rewrite them but rather just avoid being blatant by saying things like "Thank God", try referencing the fact that the author has stopped writing with something like "What a shame" this means that the article isn't obviously taking a stance on this, but the reader can work out that it intends to. The only other problem is your ending section, I thought it was a bit incoherent and would recommend that you take another look just to make sure it is as good as you think it can be.
Prose and formatting:	7	This pretty good, your spelling and grammar are of a reasonable standard, though I did notice a couple of errors as I read through, my recommendation would be to proofread carefully if you make any major changes to the article, this helps not only spelling and grammar, but also makes sure the story stays on track, it seems to me that you have the ability to proofread yourself, but remember that the proofreading service is around if you can't be bothered. Besides that my only complaint is that I think there is room for another image in the article, as there seems to be a lot of space between the first and second image where the template is currently positioned, it just seems to me that another image here would ensure that there is no part of the article that is without visual aid. This is of course completely up to you, my feeling is that an image would help. I also feel that your other images could be a little larger since there is plenty of room for such an increase in size.
Images:	7	You have good images and they are generally appropriate, but I would urge you to have another look at the formatting, besides the image based points I mentioned above the only thing I think you should think about are captions. It is easy to underestimate their importance to an image, but I think that the gun image would work much better with a caption, you could even make it a joke with the last image if you captioned it "BANG!" this would heighten the general satire of the piece. Otherwise you have done well with the images.
Miscellaneous:	6	My overall grade of the article.
Final Score:	32	My feeling is that this article has the ingredients to be brilliant and that the potential is there, the points in your article where this comes through are markedly higher in quality than the others. As I said before you seem to be on the threshold of brilliant satire and all you need to do is make the final push to accomplish this. I would also like to remind you that this is just the way I saw the article and you should seek other opinions if you are unsure, I am also available on my talk page if you have any questions or comments about my review. Good luck making any changes.
Reviewer:	--ChiefjusticeDS 19:41, February 4, 2010 (UTC)