UnReviews:Beginner's Guide

Beginner's Guide to UnReviewing

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Well hello there! So you fancy yourself to be a snarky critic eh? You're just desperate to give your unsolicited views on stuff, right? Well then UnReviews is the place for you! Found here on this page are instructions on how to start reviewing, tips for how to write a good review, a style guide so that your UnReview will conform to the rest of UnReviews, and an example UnReview for you to get an idea of how yours should look like.

Starting a New UnReview

OK, so the first thing you need to do is come up with something to review. There are a multitude of topics that fall under UnReviews, and looking through the UnReviews Library is a good way to choose a topic. There is also a list of requested UnReviews pages at Uncyclopedia:Requested_Articles#UnReviews where you can pick a specific page to create. Or you can simply review the last movie you saw, book you read, or restaurant you ate at etc. One thing is for sure though, make sure you search for the topic you want to review to make sure someone hasn't already done it. If someone has, simply contribute to the existing page.

So now that you have your topic, you need to start creating your article. You can do this by typing the exact name you want your UnReview to appear as in the "create a page" box on the UnReview main page, or simply make a new page with UnReviews: first in the title.

Creating your UnReview

There are detailed instructions on the create a new UnReview page that comes up when you use the "create a page" input box at the main page. Make sure you read these instructions before you start writing. In addition to these instructions, you should also follow the style guide, found bellow here, so that your UnReview looks good and conforms to the rest of the UnReviews pages.

Style Guide

This short, bulleted guide will go through step by step what you should do to make a quality UnReviews page.

• UnReviews pages should all have an UnReviews template at the bottom of the page. It's on this template that your rating out of 5 stars will be displayed, and its important that you enter the info right so that the template appears correctly. This is the base code you should use for the template: {{Template:UnReview/}}. Your rating goes after the slash so that if your rating is 3 and a half stars out of 5, this is what you should enter: {{Template:UnReview/3.5}}
• Also, you should choose a good picture of the subject you are reviewing, such as a theatrical poster, a picture of a restaurant, etc. and place it at the top of your page. This picture should be roughly 200px in width and it should not be a thumb. The pixel length is not mandatory, but try and make the picture big enough to clearly see and not so big it takes up the page. When in doubt, look at the example UnReview.
• Also, somewhere on the page (top or bottom, doesn't matter), add __NOTOC__. This will get rid of the table of contents.
• UnReviews are different than a lot of pages, you are encouraged to write in the 1st person under this namespace. A review is, after all, just someone's lofty opinion, and that requires the use of "I". However, don't write from the 1st person as if it is you writing the article, write in the ambiguous 1st person or as a fake personality.
• Always have a conclusion in which your reviewer gives their "verdict" and a summary of their review or why they chose the rating they did. This should be the final section.
• Make use of blurbs ({{blurb|}}). Use these to highlight important points or to say something extra that isn't in the main text. These go within the review itself. In order to properly use these, follow this format: {{blurb|left (or right)|Your quote here|who said it.}}. If the source of the blurb is the reviewer, leave that last one blank. Again, refer to the example UnReview for further clarification.
• Pictures should go on the right as thumbs and blurbs should go on the left and appear under section headings. In order to do this, you may need to embed the blurb wiki code into the middle of your text.

Tips

These tips will help keep you from making crappy UnReviews.

• Avoid 0 or 5 star reviews. Rarely is anything so orgasmic or so bad that such ratings are given. Instead give realistic scores of say 1.5 stars or 4.5 stars. Be bold, give an average score of 3 stars from time to time as well.
• Avoid cliches. The often-used approach when satirizing something is to describe it as being incredibly bad when it is good or average, and incredibly good when it is bad in reality. Don't do this. Think about clever angles of satire, or if you do follow the incredibly good or bad appraoch, don't go overboard on hyperbole.
• read HTBFANJS if you are not familiar with it as all of that info still applies here.
• Submit your work to Pee Review.
• Even though your UnReview is ostensibly your opinion, you still do not own the article you create. Don't go nuclear when someone else edits your UnReview later on.

An Example UnReview

A basic example UnReview can be found here. A fully completed example UnReview can be found here.