Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Epic Beard Man

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Epic Beard Man

Please review for content and suggest any ideas you may have for expanding on it. I think it's too short as it sits right now. —John Lydon 18:21, May 13, 2010 (UTC)

Time expired again. Bookings are all cleared and I'm now reviewing this one. 24 hours. --ChiefjusticePSX 14:31, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Humour:	6	Right, this is a reasonable enough idea and you pull it off pretty well, your humour is clever and you make some good jokes throughout the article. However I would recommend that you make a few changes to it in order to improve the flow of the article a bit. The first thing that struck me as I was reading was that your humour is somewhat inconsistent, especially near the start, and you seem unsure what to start making your jokes about. Permit me to expand; look at this article note the how the introduction gives you a good idea of both where the article is coming from and sets out what it plans to do, you should come up with a way to lend the same kind of context to what you are doing. Look at it this way, you say "Epic Beard Man (Ep-pick Beer-d Man), or EBM for the lazy, is a nickname given to the homeless bearded guy who whipped some gangster’s ass on a city bus." this is OK but you go on to change the 'some gangster' part so you are referring to him as Stevie Wonder, this hurts your humour as it makes it look like you are contradicting yourself and it also prevents a reader from deciding anything about the character. Also, you don't want to make the article sound childish, especially as you are tending towards the encyclopaedic style, try and avoid using colloquialisms (more on this later) you may want to consider adopting a slightly more wikipedia-esque introduction. My suggestion regarding the contradiction would be that you take some time out to decide who is who, decide on a character for each person you will be referring to and stick with that throughout the article. Further to this you should use HTBFANJS for some good tips on how to get some quick laughs from a reader, and to avoid making jokes that some people will find unoriginal and dull. Once you are decided upon definite traits for all of the persons involved you can then rework your humour around it; as I already said you seem unsure where you want to come from with your humour and often the narrative verges away from narrating events and into rambling. My main suggestion here would be to try and stay on target as much as you possibly can, especially if you are going to adopt random humour, remember why people will come to your article, to read an amusing account of the incident that became a viral video, thus you should try and keep track of this. I noticed that a couple of times you wander away from it. My advice is that if you keep the randomness (there is no problem with it generally and you make some decent jokes using it) try and focus more centrally on the incident rather than fleshing out paragraphs with fictional background on the two. If you feel that this would be too difficult without removing the random style altogether then that is also an option, remember that satire of the truth is often better than complete nonsense; Thomas Bruso himself is an easy enough target for satire and you could easily adapt what you have already written about the unidentified black man, however this is completely up to you. My only other point on your humour is that you should try and avoid admitting in the article that you don't know exactly what went on, since this is a parody of wikipedia articles should be written in such a vein, saying "I'm not sure what happened next, I was getting high at the time" is good enough for a quick laugh but if you devote the time to developing the existing humour you can make the article much better. Personally I think that if you want to make a joke in such a vein you should do so by saying that somebody else is to blame, the same way you excuse the lack of knowledge about the start of the altercation; by claiming someone else is the problem. If you use something like this "What starts the altercation is unknown for certain because the hoochie filming the video was preoccupied with trying to score some crack when the first words were exchanged." but in a sufficiently different way it will come off much better. Generally your humour is good but it would definitely be worth going back and addressing a couple of the problems that you are having to improve the overall feel of the article.
Concept:	5	Now your concept is fine and I don't have a problem with the subject matter. My main issue here is the execution. You look to be driving at the encyclopaedic tone but you switch from 1st to 3rd person a lot throughout the article, and you typically should have only one. Saying something like "in 1826, Cowboy John moved to Arkansas. Didn't you know that? Idiot." is unprofessional, and breaks the tone of the article. I'd recommend you stay consistent throughout the article, and either narrate it in 1st person or stick to a straightfoward, third-person encyclopedic perspective. To give you a quick insight into which is which this is encyclopaedic, whereas this is the third person. Note the obvious differences, both styles are funny when they are done correctly but meshing the two together rarely works well and I have only ever seen it done well once. My advice is pick a style and stick with it, wikipedia is a great help for putting together the encyclopaedic style, just take a look at how they do so and do the same, but add the funny. As for the first person, my best advice if you feel that is the way to go is that you read as many featured articles that use the style as possible, to get a good idea of the best way to do it.
Prose and formatting:	7	Your spelling and grammar is pretty good, though there are a couple of minor errors, nothing worth getting too worked up over. My main suggestion on the spelling and grammar front is that you proofread your article carefully, if proofreading sends you off into a minor coma then the good folks at the proofreading service are on hand to help you out. Beyond that you may want to consider making the images a bit bigger as they are pretty small at the moment, and for someone who was unacquainted with the subject matter, this might effect their enjoyment. Besides that you may also wish to consider moving the images a bit further apart from each other as the bottom two are very close together.
Images:	8	Good work here, besides making the images a bit larger and spacing them put as I mentioned above there isn't much to say on this one. Just make sure that you try and relate the images to the text as much as you can and make sure any changes you make to the tone or humour in general are reflected by the image captions as it is all too easy to neglect them when editing the article.
Miscellaneous:	6	My overall grade of the article
Final Score:	32	You have a pretty solid piece of work here and you definitely have the ability to make it much better. Just make sure you keep everything consistent and work out some of the problems you are having at present. Please don't be discouraged by the criticism in this review, this a good first effort and if you take on board as much advice as you can then you will reap the benefits, remember this review is justt my opinion and there are lots more available. If you have any questions or comments for me then feel free to ask them on my talk page. Good luck making any changes.
Reviewer:	--ChiefjusticePSX 19:15, June 3, 2010 (UTC)