Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Clare GAA (again, apparently)

Main

Current

Reviewed

Archive

Guidelines

FAQ

Committee

RotM

Clare GAA

Hello, I was hoping somebody could help me improve my article. I would really appreciate help, and I am hoping somebody could point out some faults with my article that I have not noticed myself. Please criticise constructively. Thanks, Seányg 00:09, January 17, 2011 (UTC)

Never fear, Black flamingo is present. --Black Flamingo 20:55, February 4, 2011 (UTC)

Humour:	5	While you have a decent start to an article here, I'm not going to deny that it needs quite a bit of work in my opinion. However, I think I've identified quite a few things that hopefully you'll find useful when it comes to redrafting. What I'm going to do is comb through your article section by section, because I think there's quite a lot I need to say here, and there are very few broad answers here. Again there are some decent ideas here, you do a pretty good job of establishing what Clare GAA is (when I read the title I was like "buh?" - I know, typical ignorant Englishman), and the jokes themselves are ok too. What I would say though is that they may benefit from a rewording. Take a look at this line, for instance; "with the final inclusion of gingers now after much protesting from the sub species. On the condition that they always wear a helmet even after matches while they are being interviewed." I don't know if you can see what I mean, but it's a bit clumsily put together. The full stop probably shouldn't be there since you're continuing with the line immediately after, and there's a few little phrases that just stick out awkwardly, like "protests from the sub species". I have a proposed tidier version: "gingers are finally allowed to take part on the condition that they wear a helmet during and outside of gameplay." In my version, the joke is also a little more subtle, which is always good, and the words flow better. The "dirtiness" joke is the same; full of weird little clauses and parentheses that clog it up. Perhaps try something simpler like: "Clare is said to be the dirtiest hurling team in the history of the sport, both in terms of their unsportsmanlike style and their poor standard of hygiene." I'm going to talk a lot more about brackets and clauses in a moment, but apart from this your intro is ok really. Biddy Early's curse From here the article gets a little weaker. There are quite a lot of idiosyncrasies in the writing that bothered me; just weird ways of wording things and clumsy explanations. First up is where you mention the "time limit" of the curse. Do curses have time limits? This is a bit odd, and makes the prose itself seem sloppy. There's another part where you say it was the only time the Tipperary team won anything, but you don't go into enough depth for the reader to know what you're talking about. What was the only time? To what time are you referring? Do you mean while the "time limit" of the curse was in place? Remember that we cannot read your mind, just what you write down here, so try to be clear, especially when talking about something as esoteric as this. I also had a bit of a problem with the humour of this section as a whole, although a lot of that may stem from my complete ignorance of the subject. Generally however, there seem to be a lack of jokes here. All you've got is a load of statistics and so-called facts, and a bit of background to this witch character (which I'm guessing is some kind of exaggeration of what really happened), but very little in the way of actual gags. You know what I mean; little one-liners and twists in the prose. To give you an example of what you could do here, take a look at this: "hey won an a 1995 All Ireland title, a 1997 All Ireland title and in 2001 one of the team a free bottle of champagne in the local raffle." While this isn't a hilarious line by any stretch of the imagination, I hope it demonstrates what I mean. It takes the reader somewhere they're not expecting, and makes a jab at how ultimately you can consider sporting victories insignificant. I understand that you may not want to go down this road of actually insulting the team, but that's your choice of course. Clare's 1995 All Ireland success Continuing from the witch idea, a lot of the humour here is just too random to be funny. The joke about her being more powerful than Lord Voldemort and "even" Harry Houdini feels a little misguided. It's a bit silly, and to be honest I'm not too sure what the joke is actually supposed to be. It doesn't make much sense because Voldemort isn't real, and Houdini wasn't a supernatural being - am I missing something here? (Another quick note, why are their names in speech marks? And why would this explanatory comment appear here, shouldn't it be in with the part where you talk about the witch?). It gets even more random after this however, where the victory causes and earthquake and kills a dog, etc, etc. The problem is; it's nonsense, isn't it? It's not funny because it doesn't satirise anything and there's no coherence to it. There is limited humour in nonsense because you could basically be saying anything. You could say "the victory was so unexpected that every man in Ireland simultaneously died of shock and turned into caterpillars" and it wouldn't be any more or less funny (and about equally as relevant too). The best advice I can probably give here is to find humour in the reality of it. No one expected them to win, right? So what jokes can you extract from that? I really recommend you read How to be funny and not just stupid and as many of our best of as you can, these should both give you an idea of how to approach facts in a humorous way. Clare U21 All Ireland success One of the key jokes here, I'm sorry to say, is a bit clichéd. I speak of the "citation needed" gag, of course. Also, you don't actually do it right. If you want to do it, just insert this: {{Cn}}, although I would recommend you avoid such jokes as we've seen them dozens of times before. People have been doing it for as long as Uncyc has been around, in fact. If you can think of a fresh way to do them that would be great, but I'm not going to hold my breath. There are more interesting ways of implying things are lies anyway, by using subtle hints in the language (exaggerating something can make it appear false, or by having the narrator sound generally unconvincing in his/her speech patterns). Then again we get more randomness here, with the player who exposes himself to old ladies. Even if that, in fact, turns out to be true, I would suggest you make it more obvious that it's true. And in any case, why is it funny? Have you thought about that? Just baldly stating something mad is rarely funny, but like I say above, if you can twist the text so the reader thinks it's going to go somewhere completely different, and then surprise them, it's more likely to catch them off guard (and that's basically what jokes do, right?). Previous county players Ok, there was actually a line I really liked here. It was the one where you said: "Despite the criticism, Ollie decided not to give up, but then he did". this twists in the exact same way I've been trying to explain to you all the way through this review. You should try more things like this. The good news is that now I know you can do it, and I have hope that you can make this article hilarious if you just take a little more time and care with your writing. The main problem with this section, and perhaps a large quantity of the article as a whole, is the fact that while the jokes are ok, they jump around way too much. Each sentence is a totally new random fact or bit of silly trivia - it's essentially a big list of things about Clare GAA, with no flow or narrative or consistent angle to it. It wouldn't read much differently if it were all a load of bullet points. I'm struggling to point you towards an example of an article that might help as I've never really encountered a sporty one like this before. However, this one on a band might do. If you get time have a read of it, it's very successful in telling the history of a group, and then the separate people involved, like your article does in a slightly less successful way. Note how it flows from section to section, building on points and developing jokes. It's essentially a story, with fully realised characters and conflicts. I think this could be a good blueprint for you, and hopefully may give you some ideas. Gaelic Football in Clare Why won't you go there? I don't get it.
Concept:	5	Conceptually it's a bit all over the place. One moment you're talking about evil curses and the next realistic facts about the athletes. Consistency is an important factor in an article, especially one like this which has a pretty niche appeal. People who don't know anything about Clare GAA (which I'm guessing is going to be basically every non-Irish reader we have) will find it really hard to follow. So what I would suggest here is to trim anything that doesn't fit in with a core idea about what Clare GAA is. If you want to do a load of random stuff about witches and magical earthquakes you can, just keep it consistent. Although to be honest I think a realistic approach would be much funnier, and would be much less likely to bemuse the reader (as I was reading a lot of the witch stuff). Nonsense can get really tiresome after a while. What would also help is a good running gag. These can really help with consistency issues, and to be honest, I think pretty much every good article on here has one. The one about the band that I link to above repeatedly refers to the enormous and ridiculous 1980s-style hairdos of the artists. The reason it works so well is that even though no one has heard of the actual band, the idea of rockstar vanity is such a well known concept that it ends up having quite a wide audience. So is there anything funny about Clare GAA that you could exploit in this way? Something that isn't going to alienate readers?
Prose and formatting:	4	As I've kind of hinted in the above sections, the prose is rather messy at times. Take a look at this sentence for example: "Biddy Early (1863-1917) is the unpopular county Clare native who cast a spell on the Clare G.A.A. teams in the 1900's, not allowing these fine sporting talents to achieve their expected potential of winning several All Irelands possible in the time limit of the curse". The whole thing is just really confused, there are way too many little clauses in there that needn't be there, and the result is that it becomes impossible to follow by the end. I've read it over and over and I'm pretty sure it doesn't make sense. You need to slow down here, and break things up if they're not directly related to each other. Take the time to introduce a character, then deal with their actions, and finally tell us the results. Don't try to cram everything into one sentence, and don't rush what you're saying. People are never going to find your article funny if they can't understand it. In the Clare's 1995 All Ireland success section there are a lot more examples of this kind of thing. Again the opening sentence is way too long and makes little sense grammatically. When you start a sentence with "probably the most electrifying moment in sports entertainment" you have to say "is" at some point to define exactly what this electrifying moment you're referring to is. You don't do that here. In the same section, the sentence that starts "RTE pundit Marty Morrissey" suffers from exactly the same thing. Again you're trying to cram in too many clauses (a hurling commentator on national television) and parentheses (and a native of Kilmurry Ibrickane in Clare) in there. It's just too much, try to trim stuff like this down, and try to avoid using brackets wherever possible because all they do is interrupt the flow. A strong piece of writing makes it clear what it's talking about throughout its prose. So instead of breaking flow and saying "Offaly (a rival county hurling team", just refer to them as "rival county, Offaly". Another thing I think I mentioned in the humour section is the weird language you use. Well, there's still plenty more of that to talk about too. One that springs to mind is the phrase: "nearly verged on orgasmic emotions". Now, I know what you mean, but I definitely think you should try to use more ordinary ways of putting things. Something like "nearly had an orgasm" would do, because that's more like what a real human being who speaks English would say. Another little phrase I had this issue with is strangely howling". There are also a few poor choices of adjectives here, like "electrifying" and "thundering". You should avoid using too many descriptive words, especially bizarre ones like this. They sound like the kind of thing an American wrestling commentator would say. Basically it looks like you're trying to use interesting language, but I don't think it's quite as successful as you've hoped. Just write plainly. With comedy writing it's so important to be clear when you write. Unless the joke is wordplay, which none of this is, I suggest you take a more minimalistic approach. Reading the article aloud should help here. If it jars, or if it doesn't sound like something people actually say, get rid of it. One last tip here, the line "Clare of course dominating the game" uses the wrong tense - it should be "dominated".
Images:	6	Your pictures are adequate; not bad, but not amazing. I think it would help if you made them all bigger, especially the first one, which as your main image should really be huge and striking. I would also move the Wikibox thing further down to accommodate more room for it. I wasn't a fan of the dog one because its only really tenuously linked to the subject matter, and I also didn't like the last one of the fat man - mainly because it has a huge "stock photo" banner across it. You should probably work on your captions too, if you can, my advice in the humour section is relevant there too.
Miscellaneous:	5	My overall feeling.
Final Score:	25	So to sum up, take another look at the clumsier parts of the prose, see if you can get some more good gags in there, and have a think about what you want to do conceptually here, as like I said it's a bit scattergun right now. I think the article would probably benefit from a bit more brevity too, so that's something worth thinking about when you come to revising. Sort some of these issues out and the article will immediately be in much better shape. Apart from that good work, I can tell you've worked hard on this already. Sorry if I sound harsh at times, but I ended up saying so much about the stuff that I had problems with that there was no room for the stuff I thought was ok. If there's anything I've said here that you want me to explain better, or if you want my opinion on anything I might have missed, please let me know and I'll try to help. I hope the review is ok.
Reviewer:	--Black Flamingo 14:01, February 5, 2011 (UTC)