Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/My Family
My Family[edit source]
I am on a mission to finish my first article. You, lucky reviewer and possibly former underling, now have the opportunity to aid me along this perilous journey. I hereby request a review! On this page it shall be written, and ignored shall be my lack of links and images, as they are currently in limbo, waiting for the time that I should add them in! Should you accept this task you shall, upon completion, receive a thank you, as well as my gratitude, to last until I inevitably forget who the hell you are. Good luck, fair reviewer, and godspeed. Also, to any of my former comrades that enjoy accusing me of lazy acts beyond comprehension, I will complete a review sometime between now and the day after I notice my review is completed. Unsolicited conversation Extravagant beauty PEEING 23:36, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
- I'm on the case. IronLung 02:37, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Hopefully I can be of some assistance here, because I wrote a recently featured article in a very similar style, but I don't want to be a complete arsehole by constantly comparing your article and mine, so I'm just going to try and tell you what I think generally works in an article written in this style.
| Humour: | 4 | Some of the one-liners in this article are very effective. The quarterback line is good, because the narrator has no comprehension of what her mother is talking about so the joke works on two levels at once. The same can be said of this: "I don't get why he would need someone else to yank his rope when he could do it himself. Boys are weird." Reincorporation of an earlier line about yanking the rope, plus the misunderstandings of youth, make lines like this winners. Buddy and Wiser are awesome dog names.
So, why the low humour score, you ask? Well, because of the inconsistency in the concept (described below), there are many more misses (in the form of wasted opportunities) than there are hits, and explicit descriptions are not funny when they are coming from a schoolgirl. |
| Concept: | 6 | The root concept here is simple but effective. It's an unpleasant subject viewed through rose-tinted glasses, and this kind of article almost always works. The mainspace My Family article is written in an Aristocrats style, e.g. blatantly stating unpleasantries in the most offensive way possible. That style of article almost never works. Your article occupies an uncomfortable in-between stage, where the child has a rose-tinted view of her family, but also makes the unpleasantries of her life explicitly clear.
The key is consistency. For example, the narrator clearly has little understanding of what her abusive parents are talking about most of the time (rose-tinted style), but then goes on to describe occasions of physical and verbal abuse in detail, using profanity (Aristocrats style). My advice would be to take the rose-tinted style and just run with it. When it comes to describing abuse, subtlety is so much more effective than blatant descriptions. Subtlety is more jokes like "don't marry the quarterback", and less jokes like "fucking immigrant language" and "dickwad". Another common way of achieving subtle humour at Uncyclopedia is changing links to point to unlikely pages, so that the hover text reveals the reality of the situation. Brothel is an excellent example of where subtlety really makes an article shine. In my mind, a fourth-grader (I suppose that's about 9 years old?) mentions almost everything in passing: this is done well in only one place ("My brother also likes to collect stamps"). Also, profanity removes from the authenticity of the article. |
| Prose and formatting: | 6 | Prose and formatting is passable, but there are certain things that stick out. Using intentional misspellings for simple words looks more lazy than childish: remember that this is clearly a written report, in which the narrator is trying to impress her teacher, and on which she has already used her spellchecker. Misspelling by children are another all-or-nothing thing, like the concept (see I maed a yuky doody, etc.) and I don't think it is justifiable here at all. Childish grammar is okay, though.
Another annoyance for me was "The End" as a section header, creating a new section with no content. Formatting the words to be bold and large would eliminate this section, and stop "The End" from appearing in the table of contents. |
| Images: | 0 | Obviously I can't give you a score where there are no images, but I can make suggestions about the best kinds of images to use: either hideous images with glossy captions, or glossy images with subtle captions about what's really wrong. |
| Miscellaneous: | 4 | Unfortunately the overall impact of this article is dragged down by the lack of images. |
| Final Score: | 20 | It's not a bad attempt, but you need to throw yourself behind a single coherent vision of what you want your article to be. I would definitely move it into mainspace as it is far better than the current My Family article. |
| Reviewer: | IronLung 03:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC) | |