Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace[edit source]
Background: David Foster Wallace is a writer. He uses overwhelmingly many footnotes. He is extremely pretentious and hard to understand. Go to his wiki page if you want more information.Chairman 12:04, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
| Humour: | 6.5 | This is very good and it breaks the mold, something there’s all too little of at the moment, so major Kudos there. The first three non foot note sections are way too short - although I like the use of footnotes to take the piss it strays into being too much of a novelty. I've tided some of the smaller errors up {biography instead of life etc} - you use the notes n the section titles which screw the code a little and I would remove that particular one.
You capture a lot of his style (I believe) however it does seen s that little bit closed off, anything to open it out would be a dramatic improvement - I think that because you focus so much on the notes that main stuff seems thinner than it needs to be - although he himself is not a balanced writer I would attempt to correct that (whilst keeping your thing with it). Many of the jokes stray towards being that bit too factual and some o the sillier ones seem to fall a little flat the Kitten Huffing and the whole satirical exposition of irony seems to clash badly. My advice would be to have the whole thing fit together better – I would have the extensive footnotes fit in better with the prose which should be significantly longer and this will help the article read more fluidly and make it easer to understand. The stubby issue seems to really drag the article back little - the well understood and elaborate footnotes seem not to really create the balance needed - ultimately I would move the thing into your userspace like this User:Chairman/David Foster Wallace and build up the first sections over time so that it all flows a little better - its a key issue with wring for the site any flows or awkward pacing show up a quite bit here. I like the article a lot but as you might guess I would say that it's a long way from completion (this is not a bad thing, articles that are written in a couple of days and fired out are usually pretty crap). Some of the grammatical choices are not too good; lots of strike out text is not too advisable it looks a little amateurish. There are one or two bits that jump to first person seem a little off (this may just be his style) i.e. "Didn't know that, did you? You imbecile!" while the rest is in second person. Other than these the prose is very strong and well written. |
| Concept: | 6.5 | Very good idea and not like anything we have at the moment a really good idea - For my personal view, the content can be anything but a closer attention to giving an encyclopedic look is quite important in mainspace articles (i.e. we have UnBooks where the style of particular authors can be more directly satirized - you could consider turning the article into an UnBook and focus more heavily in imitating the style?) - I always like the idea that at a glance the article looks like the real thing (an encyclopedia) and that only on closer inspection does it reveal the parody - here it's a tad off from that - with expansion it'll be interesting to see how it turns out, I would avoid to much novelty factor. |
| Prose and formatting: | 6.8 | Very impressive, Other than the stubby quality which can easily be ironed out this article is superbly written. The formatting is a little stubby and needs filling out but his I’m sure can be done. The template at the top is a moot point I tend to avoid templates as they look ugly, here its alright, should you remove it you can keep the category by adding [[Category:Highbrow]]. Plenty of links (always room for more - I aim for the "Lightsaber look") and no red ones, I did not see any typos but the smaller text is quite hard for me to read so perhaps aim to get it proofread; you just add this {{Proofread}} and somebody should come along and go though it. |
| Images: | 6 | Only the one - at this length and with the formatting it's going to be herd to put more in, I like the neologism use in the caption, but this is not a strong area of the article: you can request an image to be made for your article here, Uncyclopedia:RadicalX's Corner (or Image Request). Nothing major here |
| Miscellaneous: | 6.5 | I like this article, I think that it needs more work and maybe a bit more opening out, it's simply too inaccessible for general readers, and a bit more explanation and fuller prose section rather than such heavy footnotes would make the article a lot better ( I realize this is part of the parody of Wallace but it does seems the balance has not being kept here) would improve it a great deal. Overall a very impressive piece - I hope you continue to work on this one. |
| Final Score: | 32.3 | I hope this has been helpful, for any further tips and advice just leave a note on my talkpage:) |
| Reviewer: | — Sir Sycamore (talk) 17:38, 23 August 2008 (UTC) | |