User talk:Periodone/The Lady of Shalott

Pee Review

Humour:	6	It feels ad-libbed, like stuff just kind of pops into the story without any real reason. See endnotes.
Concept:	8	Love literary-themed articles.
Prose and formatting:	6	Use paragraphs wisely! See endnotes.
Images:	7	The first one, captioned "What a douchebag", is the most interesting. The others don't make much sense to me.
Miscellaneous:	5	I kind of wish this would come together.
Final Score:	32
Reviewer:	----OEJ 00:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Endnotes;

Style first. Break all the sections into paragraphs. Prose should be arranged for ease of reading and for strength. Short sentences are strong. Short paragraphs are stronger than long ones. Important words should come at the end of sentences. Important sentences should come at the end of paragraphs.

This is very important because strong writing holds the reader.

Weak writing -- huge paragraphs, long wandering sentences, misplaced emphasis -- bores and alienates the reader, leads him to strong drink, and to clicking the "random page" link just to get the hell away from your article. Therefore: break all the sections into paragraphs. Vary the length of the paragraphs. Vary the sentence length and rhythm. Give the reader a chance to survive.

Now for content. I'm sorry, but the first section does not fit with the next section ("Background information"). They are two different stories. Eliminate one of them.

You see, an article like this one needs to tell a single, coherent story about the characters. The Lady of Shallot cannot be a child with mean stepsisters who was locked in a tall tower and at the same time a child who was bitten by a radioactive spider whilst clambering around the Empire State Building with King Kong. It does not make any fucking sense.

And whatever else you do when telling a story, you have to make some kind of sense.

Take a look at the lists. They also contain incoherent and downright silly stuff. The Lady is implicated in modern television and movie stuff, but also in the lineage (?) of Hitler, the assassination of Lincoln, and ancient Greek legends (Achilles). Huh? This does not make sense, temporally or culturally.

I advise you to buckle down, make a coherent storyline, and restructure the prose into paragraphs and pleasing arrangements of sentences. Find what makes the Lady of Shallot tick, and make that central to her story. As you know, the Tennyson bit has it that she was sort of obsessed with fantasy versus reality, and died before reaching the "reality" of Camelot. Was the poem a commentary on fiction and reality? On art and the world? On the place of women in Victorian England?

In my lousy stinking opinion you had better find out what makes the real piece important, and then discover what a proper way of satirizing or parodying it would be.

Again, my opinion: if one uses trivial ways of parodying an important literary work then one's parody will itself be trivial. It will be uninteresting. If one can strike to the heart of the original, find what is worth talking about, and then use those truly important aspects of the work inside the parody, then the parody will speak truly to the piece. The parody will run deep, it will address important truths, it will be interesting and even engrossing.

Good luck. You have chosen a topic rich with possibility.

----OEJ 00:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

• Comment Absolutely brilliant review. Mightydandylion (talk) Fk 06:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)