Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Egg sighted (not quick)
Egg sighted [edit source]
|Fonchezzz| Quacking|
00:53, October 15, 2010 (UTC)
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PEE REVIEW IN PROGRESS of giving you his opinion and pretending you care. |
| Humour: | 2 | Hey, fonchezzz. So, I'm writing you up this Pee Review after you were dissatisfied with my cursory dismissal of this article over on the forum. Hope this is helpful.
Let's get right to talking about the concept. I'll give a section-by-section review in the prose section. |
| Concept: | 1 | The concept of this article is truly what kills it. The article is essentially based on a pun - that "excited" sounds a little bit like "egg sighted." This pun isn't part of the concept; there's really no mention of excitement in the article.
Instead, we just hear a little bit about a fictitious condition called "Ovospectranitus," wherein people or animals - mostly animals - see eggs where there are no eggs. This condition satirizes nothing. It resembles no actual disease; the article makes no references to anything resembling actual responses to diseases; it simply has no real-world analogue at all. It's just an article that, basically, says "Wouldn't it be silly if this exists." That's not a viable concept for an article. We have thousands of articles with that kind of concept. Someone will write, say, Frog with Seven Butts, because it would be silly if that existed, but then, because there's no satire to be had, they'll be relegated to just making up random facts about the Malaysian Seven-Butted Frog. And, ultimately, the article will be neither interesting nor funny, and frankly just kind of annoying to read. It's as though some kid ran up and said "Wouldn't it be funny if there was a frog with seven butts?" And my first response would be "Um, yeah, kid, it sure would, now go away." That's basically the way I feel about "Egg sighted." "Wouldn't it be funny if there was a condition that made you see eggs where there were no eggs??" Um... well... I guess. Actually, it really wouldn't be that funny. |
| Prose and formatting: | 4 | Okay, let's take this section-by-section now.
Quote: It's just not funny to have an "unrelated quote guy" pop in and say random things. Look, everyone who's ever edited Uncyclopedia can say random things. Here's one: "I've never shot a plate out of my nose." Did you laugh? I didn't. Anyway, we already have an article about "unrelated quote guy": it's called Captain Irrelevant. It's pretty awful. What does it mean to be Egg Sighted: The worst thing about this section is that it doesn't answer its own question in the first paragraph. When I start reading your article, I have absolutely no idea what it's about. When the first thing I'm told is that one in about 4 trillion people are "egg sighted," it gives me no information at all. How can I laugh at something I don't even understand? Also, one common mistake of new Uncyclopedians is large, arbitrary numbers. There's nothing funny about the number 4,020,567,543,467. It's just a large, arbitrary number. After reading about a hundred articles that tell us, for example, that string cheese was invented in 2,352,126,237,132 B.C. by Oscar Wilde, we've all come to despise them. The throwaway reference to another article - bashing your head against a wall to experience hallucinations - isn't funny, and just feels like riding another author's coattails. The reference to the scientific study being done by third-graders isn't exactly a laugh riot. What's the satiric joke, here - that scientists are dumb and will accept studies with virtually no methodology behind them? Er, okay. Finally, the second paragraph tells us what "egg sighted" is: things look like eggs. Well, okay. It then concludes by telling us that someone had an egg in his mouth in Airplane, which is another example of attempted "humor by reference." A lot of novice Uncyclopedians make this mistake, too: they'll say "Hey, remember that one time on Family Guy?" Which just makes me wish I was watching Family Guy instead of reading that article. Cases: What this section really screams to me is "THE AUTHOR HAD NO PLAN FOR THIS ARTICLE." It tells two short, random stories. One of them involves drugs and random numbers. The other involves a seven-year-old who died for no reason. Neither of them satirize anything; both are random; neither of them establish the "egg sighted" condition as a real thing; neither of them give us any more information about the "egg sighted" condition; I just don't have any reason to even continue reading this article after this. Egg sighted in nature: At this point, the article just abandons any discussion of "egg sightedness" in humans completely, which sort of feels like the author was thinking "Hmm, I can't make this funny in humans, but maybe I can make it funny in snakes." Aviary cases: The first thing it does is laugh at the fact that there are birds called "tit" and "booby," something that stopped being funny to most people after second grade. It then says that a scientist with a random silly name found that the condition made birds keep sitting on their eggs after they hatched. Well, at least this would be a logical consequence of "egg sightedness," so at least this is one part of the article that actually has something to do with another part of the article. As such, I would say that this is the first section that was not a complete, absolute, 100% failure. But it's still not funny. If anything, if this were real, it would just be sad. Reptilian cases: After another made-up silly name, we learn that some snakes ate some bombs and blew up. That's the whole joke: "Some snakes ate some bombs and blew up." The article takes two paragraphs to tell this joke. We're given all kinds of irrelevant and unfunny information, like that the snakes caught the disease from birds (who cares?) and that the incident took place in 2001 (who cares?) and that this happened in Australia (who cares?) The article then randomly mentions a current event - the BP oil disaster. The idea that the BP oil rig was caused by a pyromaniac whale is slightly amusing. To be brutally honest, it is the only slightly amusing thing in this entire article. And it has nothing at all to do with either the concept of the article or anything else that can be found in the article. Taking action: Here, we find that the author's motivation for writing the article was for someone to send him money, a tired joke which has been told in many articles including Can I borrow 5 bucks? and Why?:Don't we do it in the road? In sum, after reading this article, I found about 20 things that I found aggressively annoying, and one thing that was even faintly amusing. For five kilobytes of text, that is a terrible payoff. The one silver lining here is that the sentence are in gramatically correct English and the formatting looks fine. Which is encouraging, because it means you can write and you can make an article look good, which means that, in theory, you could write something very funny if you came up with an infinitely better idea than a condition called "Egg Sighted." At least this is one failure of an article where I don't want to just say "Come back when you can speak English." So, that's good. |
| Images: | 4 | I guess I've got to give props for at least trying to alter pictures to fit the theme of the article, rather than picking random silly pictures and trying to write captions that attempt - badly - to relate them to the article. That's the most common novice mistake. So, your mistake is... less bad.
But these are just so badly done. In the first one, there are no objects that correspond to the eggs - and the eggs aren't even cut out; they're just cropped, with the white backgrounds just sitting there. It looks lazy, cheap, and confusing. In the second one, because of the black background, I could not tell that that was a bomb the first ten times I looked at it. It just looked like the egg had disappeared from the snake's mouth, and then someone had randomly inserted yellow stars in MS-Paint. But, like I said, at least the pictures actually illustrate the article. So, that's something. |
| Miscellaneous: | 2 | Two. |
| Final Score: | 13 | Okay, now that that's out of the way, let me just say: it's not my intention to chase you off, and I guess I was unnecessarily rude in the forum. So, sorry about that. This article is terrible, but it does suggest there might possibly be a good article in you somewhere.
I'll give you the same advice I give most new writers: write what you know. Find something that exists in real life that you find ridiculous, and then write something that slyly points out how ridiculous it is. It's possible to get a good article out of pure unadulterated silliness (see: Salamander), but it's incredibly hard. It's much better to try your hand at satire. One more thing: it's almost always a very bad idea to break the fourth wall. Don't write something like "tits and boobies (ha, ha, I said tits and boobies)." In general, the degree to which an author tells us he's amusing himself is directly proportional to the degree to which the author is completely failing to amuse everyone else. Best of luck to you. Again, sorry for the rudeness over on the forum; if you write something that's actually good, I'll nom it for VFH myself. But this article is totally unsalvageable because the concept is so bad. I'd move it into your userspace and list the redirect on QVFD; that'll save everyone the trouble of having to eventually delete it. This will never be a good article; if you want to write a good article, think of a new concept, and take it from there. Good luck!! |
| Reviewer: |  pillow talk 05:59, October 23, 2010 (UTC)
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I'm currently over thataway but I thought I'd drop by for no reason at all and say that unadulterated silliness works when it's part of the joke. Salamander has section headers that point out the silliness and the reader's thoughts as he reads it. Ordinarily I'd say if you need any more tips you can poke me on my talk page or whatever, but at this time I must transform into a banana peel and slide under the stove to collect dust bunnies for the museum. – Llwy-ar-lawr (talk • contribs • logs) 15:06, 6 Jun 2014