Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/HowTo:Survive a Baby (3rd time lucky?)

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HowTo:Survive a Baby [edit source]

This one's requested from and reserved to a friend. Hands off, okay? BabySocks.jpg Little Pink Sock BabySocks.jpg 22:20, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Just makes me more tempted to review this, but I won't. American hospitality. ~~Sir Fightstar Rocks! CUN 23:28, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
Humour: 5 Well, LPS, for a new article, it has a lot of things that new users forget: a coherent direction. On the negative side, however, I don't really think you cover the instructions that well. Half of this article seemed like a rant, sort of along the lines of "this is how you take care of a baby, and it's f***ing annoying". When you're writing a HowTo, you have to make sure it's tone consistent- as difficult as raising a baby is, you need to jokes inside your instructions, as opposed to outside rants. For example: "You swore that when you have grandchildren, you'd never, ever allow them to be pinned on you. Then your kid comes home with a bundle with its oh-so-blue baby eyes and itsy bitsy baby fingers and itsy bitsy to... Right". This gives me the impression that you are very angry while writing this (i'm not implying you are, it's just an impression) and it sort of spills into your text. For a section about grandparents, go along the lines of this: "despite your earlier promises never to have a baby pinned on you, that scenario is likely to occur. For said scenario, you'll need to...". The key to HowTos is to make satrical, but plausible, instructions, so if you're talking about how to take care of a baby, mention how difficult it is by making your instructions more complex and difficult. This drives your point home without making you seem like a lunatic.
Concept: 7 Instructions on how to take care of a baby have the potential to be very funny, mostly because taking care of a baby is incredibly difficult. That being said, how you execute it could make your break your article. As stated above, you need to polish this oof so that it feels like a HowTo. The more difficult it seems, the funnier your article is. There are also a couple of areas you skip on: where does the father come in in all of this? Can you pin the responsibility on your overtrusting friends? Can you mooch off the government to make it easier? The possibility to improve this article are endless- since I assume you've taken a lot of your article from your own experiences, why don't look up others who have the same problem? Do some fishing around on Wikipedia or Yahoo answers, and see what kind of things people have to deal with when it comes to babies. Take said things and transform them into instructions.
Prose and formatting: 4.5 There are a couple of grammar mistakes here and there, so take some time to proofread your article. But the main problem here is that it kind of looks like a wall of text. As a general rule, images are used to compliment text most of the time. Your images are sparse, making your article more difficult to read. Here's what I would do: cut down some of your longer sections very slightly (such as sleep, the nasty business, and health issues) and pop and image into each of them. See below for some ideas for images.
Images: 6.5 Overall, they're alright, but I cvan spot two problems. Your first image is a little creepy, first of all, so i'd recommend changing it out with something that accomodates the article more, such as a picture of a baby throwing a lit match onto something valuable. Your other problem, as stated above, is that your other two are a little too big, so i'd recommend scaling them down and fitting them to individual sections. You'll need a few more images, and here are a few ideas I can think of off the top of my head: a picture of a pregnant woman somewhere near the beginning, an ambulance or fire truck to demonstrate that the baby has caused chaos, and a picture of a seemingly innocent crib with an ominous caption. These are just some ideas, so make sure you look for a few yourself.
Miscellaneous: 5.5 My overall grade of the article.
Final Score: 28.5 You've got an interesting idea that could be expanded upon to be made into a solid article, but as of right now it needs some polish. To recap, the most important thing is that you write it like a HowTo. If you want, ask some of our better writers about articles that are similair to yours, or maybe ask your adopter for a good example for you to follow. I know all of the things that I mentioned may seem like a lot of work, but I encourage you to keep working on this- it has a lot of potential, but will require a rewrite and change of language to bring it up to code.

Bottom Line: Write it so that it sounds more like a HowTo, and get some more images to relieve the text. Good luck! =)

Reviewer: Saberwolf116 00:12, 19 June 2009 (UTC)