UnBooks talk:Gone Fishing

Pee Review(s)

Humour:	8	I thought that your humour was pretty good. You have a good grasp of the story you are trying to get across and the characters all develop well throughout the article. I did think there were a couple of minor problems,however. The first thing that I noticed was that while your jokes are all good the formula begins to tire in the first half of the article. Essentially, the grandfather suggests something, the boy questions it, the grandfather gives a poor explanation as to why this is necessary, now this provides ample amusement for the reader especially early on, but as you near 'Epic battle with boredom' section, it is becoming quite predictable. My recommendation would be to just mix in some more developments of this idea. For example, where you said "a history, I'll have you know, that was rife with manly exploits. I know. I was there." "I'll say." Now, I'm not saying just put in a couple more of these jokes, the point I'm making is that this departure from the formula that you already had going in the article made me sit up and start paying attention and I think the rest of the first half of the article could do with some similar ideas. This is less of a problem in the second half of the article since there is plenty in the text to keep a reader entertained. The only other problem that I could find was that the grandfather's dialogue sometimes felt unnecessarily long for the joke you were trying to get across, again this is a relatively minor problem, but I would recommend that you focus on the exchange of dialogue between the characters to provide the majority of the humour. My advice for fixing this would be to keep the majority of what the grandfather says, but go through and cut some of it out. Be harsh with it as I know it can difficult to prune stuff out of an article you are already pleased with, but try to only keep what you feel are the best parts.
Concept:	9	Your concept is pretty good and puts me in mind of articles like this one. The most important thing for you to focus on here is the tone, notably the tone of the boy. Try to keep it consistent throughout, there are parts of the article where the boy seems to be meek and quiet and others where he seems to be louder and prepared to challenge his grandfather on things, these occasions are not frequent but I recommend that you go back and take a quick look, because it breaks the tone slightly. I'm not suggesting that you have no character development in the article at all, but rather that if you are going to have some kind of shift in the boy's attitude and demeanour that it is built up and not just randomly interspersed occasionally. Otherwise I was pretty happy with this.
Prose and formatting:	7	Your prose is fine, there are a couple of typos but nothing to really get aggravated over. The main thing that is hurting your score here is your formatting, your image formatting to be more specific. The images are all quite small and are all relatively spread out throughout the article, this can lead to large parts of the article with no image at all. I don't think you need to put in more images but rather make the existing ones a bit bigger and spread them out a bit. If you take a look at the article the amount of white space is quite staggering, I realise that this is one of the inherent problems when you are using dialogue between characters to make up the article, so if you are unsure of the best way to go about correcting this I would recommend that you take a look at the way these two articles format their images and try doing yours the same way.
Images:	8	Your images are fine, it is just the above formatting issues that are pulling your score down. As an alternative to messing with the size of all the images, you could consider just adding a new one, you are experienced enough to choose a new image without me banging on about the best way to choose one for another 5 lines, so I will leave that in your capable hands.
Miscellaneous:	8	My overall grade of the article.
Final Score:	40	You have a pretty good article here and your score reflects that. The only major problems that I have been able to identify can be fixed with relative ease and there is no need to start meddling with the article's general style and substance. My main recommendations would be to fix the tone problems, revisit a couple of point on your humour and see what you can do with the formatting. As to your VFH query, I would say that if you nominated it now, you would get a real mixture of opinions and would get a few against votes, enough to prevent it passing. However do not take my word for it, I have been wrong about VFH before. Oh and before I forget, thank you for your comment on my talk page on abstaining, it occurred to me that I hadn't responded to you on that, so thanks very much. You can find me on my talk page again if you have any questions or comments about my review. Well done and good luck making any changes.
Reviewer:	--ChiefjusticeDS 10:24, October 29, 2009 (UTC)