Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/UnNews:"Crunchberries" Aren't Real Berries; Cap'n Crunch Arrested
UnNews:"Crunchberries" Aren't Real Berries; Cap'n Crunch Arrested[edit]
projectjulio 01:35, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
I might sound curt but I'm actually in a hurry so please don't interpret my response as aggressive.
1. You're welcome to make AP Style changes yourself. What I disagree with is the fact that you think these companies are being misleading. If you think a crunchberry is a real berry you deserve to die a painful death by the hands of an angry munchkin.
2. I have a difficult time with all these wiki-formatting things since I am knew to this. If you have the time to review this you should have the time to put an adequate picture. I wanted to recycle something other than a standard picture of the cap'n.
3. AP Style. The direct object in the lead sentence is captain crunch, NOT "police officer," namely because I did not put "police officer" in the sentence. The art of journalism is using as few words as possible while still saying as much as possible. To say who arrested him in the lead is a waste of words, which is why I left "the police" out of the sentence entirely. Invisible direct objects do not exist, unfortunately. You aren't the only kid take Journalism courses in college. There are at least 7 of us in Guam and other uS Protectorates alone!
4. Ambiguities and clarification: A class-action lawsuit is filed by a single party ON BEHALF of a larger constituent. The 8-year-old boy is the same boy who we later learn initiated the ONE investigation in the first place in order to file the suit. There is one suit. One investigation. I changed the ambiguity but it took little more than 1 minute to do so. I'd appreciate you make minor edits like that with a short explanation. Brevety is not required here.
5. I appreciate the review, however I ended with lucky charms because it seems formulaic to take the remaining cereal characters and do essentially the same thing to them. However, if you do decide to do them I would be more than happy to accept them.
6. ...and the premise is: So, other than some ambiguities that were easy to fix, what's the problem again? The joke is that the police spent one year figuring out that a crunchberry is not a real berry when every 8 year old who looks at a crunchberry knows that it is not a real berry. The parody is making the claim that crunchberries look like real berries to most people, when in reality we know 99.999% of the population knows this simple fact.
I created a world in which everyone in that world has the intelligence of the woman who initially thought they were real berries. An 8 year old boy is smarter than her. The consequences of this detail are that they spend millions of dollars and over a year of work to figure this simple little fact out. The 8 year old boy is so advanced compared to them that he's profiting off of everyone. IT's like idiocracy, except the 8 year old boy is the smart one.
<opinion>
| Prose and Formatting: The writing style, spelling, grammar, layout and overall appearance. |
6 | Spelling is good - there's no misspellings that I came across in here at least. Grammar on the other hand is a little average, at least in regards to verbs on the passive voice. It isn't incorrect, but due to the tone of the piece trying to mimic that of a professional report it is advisable to try and get these things in order.
Layout, writing style and overall appearance are not that exciting. In fact it's very pedestrian. There doesn't appear to be any thought as to how to make the most of the space that you have or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. This is not a bad thing, but if you want more than an average response you need to put in a little more than an average amount of effort. |
| Concept: How good an idea is behind the article? |
5 | Read HTBFANJS
I have a tendency to score lower when people disappoint me. I actually knew a little about the background story of this prior to me reading the article. In fact it was this prior knowledge that made me want to come in here and have a look at it. What you have was a classic absurdist reality. A woman attempts to sue a cereal company for misleading advertising, as she believe that "crunchberries" were a type of real fruit, and she blamed the company for making out that they were. It's not that dissimilar to the "Froot Loops" not containing any fruit, or the lawsuit against McDonalds that their burgers in reality do not look like the ones in the advertising. The sad truth is that all of these complainants have valid points - they company have avoided being openly dishonest but have phrased or placed things that suggests that the product purchased will be different from what is actually sold. But we live in a world where this is an acceptable deception, and the ability to filter out the truth from advertising is a skill that comes with being in Western society. (At least for anybody with half a brain.) The problem lies that you've taken what is a ripe piece of information for satire, and you've written an article which starts off with goods intentions and gets lost along the way. This ties in very closely with humour so I'm going to continue this in the next section. |
| Humour: How funny is it? Why is it funny? How can it be funnier? |
5 | One of the core ingredients with writing nonsensical comedy is to keep it consistent, otherwise it becomes random gibberish. You have about five different investigations/lawsuits going on here and they don't really match up. You have:
So if I was to try and understand the comic reality, there was a $2 million dollar investigation into this that was government funded the same time that there was a Harvard study being done at the same time as an investigation by Nancy Drew (who is apparently male). However an 8-year old has come to a conclusion that is not that dissimilar to the conclusion from Nancy Drew and as a result has started a class action lawsuit. Which there's no mention of if there are any other complainants, so it sounds as though he is the only one involved in this class action. Now as a result of a lawsuit Cap'n Crunch has been arrested? Okay, I've been deliberately confusing in the way I wrote that last paragraph, but it has been done to show where this has fallen down. You have a fantastic piece of absurd reality, but you've dragged it into a confused parody. The article that you've written is less amusing than what it is based upon. I'm going to come back to this a little later in the misc section, as this is a concept that has the potential to be funny, but the execution has fallen short of what it needs to be. |
| Images: How are the images? Are they relevant, with good quality and formatting? |
4 | Ugly potatochop. The image has almost no relevance to the case in point. It has a terrible caption makes it worse. It's too small for the only image in the article, or you need to add another image. See UnNews:Man suffers caffeine underdose as a good example of image size and placement for an UnNews article. |
| Miscellaneous: The article's overall quality - that indefinable something. |
6.5 | Because as I said I've been mean with the scores as you've disappointed me. 6 is a below average, 7 is average. I can't decide between the two, because it's not bad, but it needs to be made better. |
| Final Score: How much can it be improved and what are the most important areas to work on. |
26.5 | This needs a rewrite, but not due to a bad concept or poor writing skills, but because you've rushed into it with almost no thought. It looks as though you've written a line and then said to yourself, "So what should I write now" and continued that throughout.
First sit down and plan what you're going to write. Create the comedic reality in your head. write down notes on what you want to do. UnNews is a story, so to tell it in a logical sequence the story has to have events leading from one to the other. The funniest line in this entire piece is your last line, and that looks to be the one that is most apart from your original concept. Also take into consideration the "Froot Loops" bit. Do Rice bubbles really go "snap crackle and pop" or is it just a rather disappointing hissing noise. (I may have used references to cereal not available in the states.) |
| Reviewer: | Pup | |
</opinion>