Talk:Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology
Review[edit]
How and why is it funny? Any suggestions?
Before I even read your article, I was slightly afraid that, written about an Indian university, this article had the students of that institute as the target audience, and so it wouldn’t be funny to a person who knew next to nothing about CIPET. Well, I am glad that I can say I’ve had a very nice read, and so I would like to help you to make this article as funny as possible!
It is to the humour of the article that I gave the most points. There different comedy themes and techniques used, you have an effective repetition of the word “small” in a few sections (just don’t overuse it), but this is far from the only technique you use. The Moon joke (“before mankind yet set foot on the Moon”, “in 1968”) is very good, as well as the quote (“I am studying in CIPET...”), which I thought would have looked even better before the introduction, the line about Wall-E and a lot of other things that I won’t mention for the fear of not being able to finish my review.
However, when you see such level of humour, it is quite disappointing, if at some moments, you feel like the author did not polish the article enough. This generally concerns prose, but not only.
For instance, I found a few sentences not linked to the rest of the article. The already mentioned one about Moon landings loses from not being referenced later. You don’t explain why you chose this event to describe the creation of the university. Maybe the costumes and the equipment of the astronauts inspired Brigadier., by showing him that you could engineer plastics? Or did Mr. Eugene think that the Moon was abundant in plastics, which could be used in Indian industry, and so decided to start his university even before the landings, so that he had no competition?
These are my ideas, but you can find many others, and an original approach to a historical event will always be interesting and funny.
There are many things, which you start talking about and abandon soon after. CIPET’s founder, Brigadier., for example, is not mentioned a single time in the second half of the article, although I find a lot of opportunities to do that effectively. For example, why would a university need to make a male reproduction organ its logo? Maybe, “the logo of CIPET honours a small and impotent thing that female beings usually don’t prefer, which Brigadier A F. Eugene carried with pride nonetheless.” (This would be my version of the phrase about the logo in the “Others” section, but once again you can find yours.)
There is also a minor issue I wanted to talk about in details. In the introduction, I thought that words such as “rubbish” and “pathetic” expressed your comedy strategy too overtly, because even if it’s not necessarily your opinion, students often rant at their university, and so it is not very funny or original. The fact that they are in quotation marks and are stricken out makes it extremely difficult to find out what you are trying to say. Putting a word in quotation marks brings specific attention to it, and usually implies irony. Maybe you were pretending that this was the opinion of students? In this case, striking through proves it false and irony later (“premier”, “institute”) does not seem very suitable, as it affirms the contrary once again. As if you were giving someone else’s opinion and then hesitating on it, suddenly saying exactly the opposite, but then hesitating on that point of view as well. I find this too complicated just for the first sentence, and you?
Concerning quotation marks, I have a suggestion, which might work quite well, but it’s up to you if you want to try it: you can pursue the ironic tone with the quotation marks only, by making the use more and more absurd. For example, you could say: “[...] CIPET is the “premier” “institute” of academics of India. It was established by the “Government” in 1968 with a “mission” of cleaning out all the “plastics” lying on the “roads” of the country [...]”. In this case, the “rubbish” and “pathetic” part seems “quite” unnecessary. (Rather confusing, no?)
How good is an idea behind the article?
The concept, in general, seems well thought-out and what is good is the diverse techniques you use and the fact that you are not afraid to make a statement and then play with it in a few lines, which is funnier than if you just made a separate joke every single time, but also keeps the reader in and interested. What I mean is “going to University of Toronto and getting kicked out”, next “as you will find out eventually, they get kicked out” and finally the next sentence.
As I said at the beginning, the fact that you were writing this for everyone, not just the CIPET students is, despite the argument on your talk page (which I have read), added to the pleasure I received when reading the page. But I am not sure you went to the end with this idea. I felt that some things still need to be explained, such as the “Kabaadiwallahas”, as the word is used three times in the article. From the context, I guessed that it meant unemployed or homeless people, but Oxford dictionary says that “kabbadi” is a name of a special game and “wallah” - a person concerned with something specific. Maybe I was right, and saying that a person is a player of a specific Indian game, is a more interesting way of saying “unemployed”, but the reader will never guess, if you don’t help him.
On the contrary, some parts could be a lot more subtle. I personally prefer the “IHTFP” abbreviation better than “it sucks”, just because it tells the same thing but not too overtly, and guessing what it means is quite interesting, which I can say, as a reader.
You may find such remarks contradictory, but sometimes keeping the balance between explicitness and hidden references, can be achieved by adding a sentence in a few places and removing a key phrase, that spoils the tone, in another. I’ll return to this type of phrases in the next section.
How good does it look and how well does it read?
Prose is one of the most important areas of a humour article, and this also is the area you need to concentrate on the most. You can write well and you do that, most of the time. But the overall impression of the prose in your article is importantly affected by how the writing in one part of your article contrasts that in the other and how you can suddenly change your tone and even jargon.
Some phrases an even sections are brilliant, for instance no matter how simply structured the quote of a CIPET student is, it’s very concise and very funny, which is brilliant (brevity is the soul of wit). However, while reading the page, I also thought that there were parts that you haven’t re-read even once. One of such phrases was the one at the end of Student life section, starting “When asked about...” It had a very complex structure, which was probably the reason why you missed a grammatical error there, but also a language I call too overt, in comparison to the other, cleverer parts. While doing my own proofreading, I modified that construction, removing both the error and the aforementioned “it sucks”. Concerning the first one, I would suggest breaking a long sentence in several small ones to avoid a too complex structure, if you are afraid of such issues. Or at least, do it in your mind and check if all the small sentences you get make sense grammatically, if they don’t, then maybe you had a problem in the initial one!
I remember a Russian movie, where the protagonist starts a so long-winded compliment to a woman, that in the middle he forgets where he started and stops at the word “because”. When it comes to that, it’s not hard to make mistakes, and more than once.
Concerning the second point, this is the same one as with the word “noobs” in Academics. It is also what I meant by you changing your jargon. The problem is that these words immediately introduce another, unneeded type of language into a previously well-written article - which is a teenager or a chatroom dialect. It generally does you no good, unless you base your joke on the word you are using, and such joke I don’t see here. And I am not talking about encyclopedic style....
Words such as “losers” and “noobs” are the ones that also tend to express your opinion, something you should try to avoid as much as possible in a humour article. If you are writing comedy, then you always express an opinion, because you need one to produce humour, but you express it in a different way than you do in other types of writing. If they simply stated what they thought, it wouldn’t have been funny. In CIPET I have noticed many such “opinions” - even “for obvious reasons” at the end of Alumni. What is obvious for you, is not necessarily obvious for me, and I am still trying to figure out why Manufacturing students never graduate, considering that there was no clear difference between Plastic Engineering and Manufacturing students at any time before that point.
To summarize, try to keep explicitness out of your article, as well as the opinion. General opinion about a subject is something that motivates you to write an article on it and should stay behind it, but shouldn’t get on paper in any obvious way, - you can consider it, as a taboo, to talk about which you need a certain circumlocution - but “small” opinions about small things are equally dangerous!
Concerning formatting, as in a Pee Review, it is usually described in the same part as prose, you page is well organized in general and I think that you know the basics of wiki coding and even more.
Be careful with sections, though, and their headings: I thought that “Others” should have been called “Trivia” instead and, in fact, shouldn’t have been a separate section in the first place. You can mention the logo in the infobox (more about it in the Image part) or add a paragraph just about it, and the railway janitors part can also be somewhere in the actual text, because the way it is now, I don’t see what specific joke you are making and how it is relevant to everything else you write.
Alumni section is not about alumni either, but rather about their achievements, and See also is supposed to give links to articles related to your topic, not just the synonyms of “small”. You can either use all of them in the article to make “small” appear less often or find pages to which you can link all of the synonyms. However, attention! They should be relevant. India? Toronto? The Moon? You decide.
How are the images? Are they relevant, with good quality and formatting?
After prose, illustrations is the part that, in my opinion, you need to take care of the most. The article has only one image, which is a pity, even though that image is good.
Remember that a well-chosen picture with a witty caption can add a lot to the humour of the text. I propose some images in this review, which you can use, if you like. In general, if it’s hard for you to find a proper illustration, you can add anything, from plastics to Indian roads and to the Moon landing. It’s always possible to make almost any image look well in almost any article. (Check Objectivity, if you want proof!)
You can also add more pictures resembling the existing one - that is, depicting some poor place, building or object and presenting it as the pride of CIPET. But what the article definitely needs is the actual logo of the university. The “small” and “impotent thing” joke can be funny on its own, but the reader might think that this is just a random mention of the male genitals, very remotely linked to the topic of the article, unless he sees that you had a reason to mention it.
Nevertheless, one important thing not to forget, is that having too many images is as bad as having too few, as the reader’s attention will be dispersed entirely, and so you should try to keep a balance between the amount of text and the number of illustrations you add to the text. But good pictures look very well in articles of a considerable size, which leads me to something else...
The article's overall quality - that indefinable something.
I am using this section to praise you on your inexhaustible amount of original ideas (“a small insect with a gene coded for cellophane”, Plastic-man, Indian ink, “small “Hot Wheels” bicycles, “the world famous Kabaadiwallahs' Chamber of Commerce”, etc.) and to remind you that if you have so many, maybe you need to make more out of them.
Trust me, size matters.
An overall summation of the article.
To conclude, this article has moments of brilliance as well as some parts that could still be worked on. I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely ready, but I would love to see it featured, which it certainly will be, after you look at a few more things.
I’ve mentioned all of the problems I found in the article, which I don’t feel the need to repeat. They mostly concerned prose and illustrations, but the page will gain a lot if you just re-read it, as if you were another person, and try to figure out how it could be improved upon in general.
But the main advise I want to give concerns your collaboraton with other users. I know that Spike added a few parts to the article and rewrote some others, and his additions were very good, but I don’t think that should stop you from making further edits. As it is your article, it is you who has the “vue d’ensemble”, as the French say, basically - the overall picture of where you want to get your article, and so don’t be afraid to appropriate others’ additions. If you consider Spike’s new sections as an encouragement to make your more of your own, for example, then you’ll be able to make it something personal.
And no matter how well Spike writes, it is impossible for another person to keep exactly the same tone as you, so it is a must that you, at least, look at others’ edits and see if you can make them fit the page better. That being said, you can still analyze what new comedy strategies another writer brings to alter your own a little and get new ideas.
Good luck and I am sure this page will soon reach a great height (even though it depends on your perception of “soon”)! Finally, if you have any questions or comments, don’t be afraid to contact me on my talk page!