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51
51
Review of On Giving Reviews  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (5.0)

I'm logging off in a minute, but I want to fave-item this article. It's wonderfully systematic, and some of the points it makes are things that come up when reviewing, but that you have articulated brilliantly, clearly and without condemnation. For instance, in the section about dialogue in fiction you say it's more than "people talking," because it's about furthering either plot, characterisation, or both. I was commenting on a piece a few weeks back, and felt this, but couldn't frame my reaction to the speeches properly in words.

I might dispute your remark that good characters are ones one would want to meet - some intensely memorable and dynamic (in plot terms) characters are good without being either nice or moral. I name Darth Vader and rest my case.

Brilliant article, inspiring in terms of wanting to go out and commit feedback on bystanders.
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52
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.5)


This is wonderful stuff, a lot of information delivered very concisely.

Some of the terms, for instance the different fabrics, meant nothing to me beyond a vague memory of Georgette Heyer mentioning them. Would it be possible to say what the texture or origin of Indian muslin, lama cloth, and pale mastic were? (I think india muslin was that terribly thin stuff one assoiciates with straining food, but cannot be sure.)

This would be even better if the text were not in a dense clump, which is daunting to the reader's eyes. Could you put blank lines between the paragraphs? Formatting seems like a quibbling thing to mention, but a little fiddling with the display on the page would make this much more accessable to readers.

You must have read widely to find out all this; have you a bibliography?
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53
Review by ness
Rated: 13+ | (2.5)

I agree. Like you, I spent many years playing AD&D, and it was a very social, problem-solving game. We laughed a lot, playing, and bonded as friends. One of the game systems we used referred to it as collaborative story telling, and it taught me a lot about characterisation and plot pacing.

However, that said, I thought "Dungeons and Dragons is Evil?"   by Xanatos was more a comment than an essay. Why, do you think, do people get the idea that the game is evil? (I suspect it's the use of terms like "demons" etc.)

If you set up the two sides of the argument, pro and con, and give a broader picture of who plays these games, how people get involved, what, usually, they get out of it, this piece could appeal to non-gamers, maybe even to people who've heard those urban myths and believed them. As it stands, this preaches to the choir.

I used to know a clergyman who ran a dungeon for his parish youth group. He was concentrating on isolated kids who needed social contact and practice at interpersonal skills. Plus, he and they enjoyed the time spent together.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (5.0)


Hmmm. Interesting. (I had to start with that because of issue # 4.)

An absolutely splendid newsletter with content anyone who comments on items here regularly, or who reviews at all, would find helpful. The articles on "How to comment on work you thought was bad," and "How to keep oneself from burning out on reviewing" were especally standout, useful and stimulating - and not topics I've seen covered before.

The initial issue, with "Reviewer Types on Safari" was original, funny and who could resist testing their personality against a Cosmo quiz?


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55
Review by ness
Rated: E | (5.0)

I'm not even a cat person to start with, but Fred is enchanting. Besides, you decribe his mischief so vividly that I was sharing your fascination, watching him explore the world.

He may be a handful to live with, but these stories gave me such a big *Delight* - I'd recommend them to anyone having a dull grey day and needing a smile.

Thank you for the read - I came here via a link from that reviewing newsletter.
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56
Review of Commuter  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (5.0)

I like this more with each rereading; at first, I thought it was all right, but didn't excite me, a second time, and I thought about the joy and thrill of seeing an old view with fresh eyes, a third, and I admired the smoothness of the verse - the absence of any points where an inappropriate word had been hauled into use for rhyming purposes or the sequence of words had been mauled into poetic shape, and the clarity of expression. I hardly dare read it a 4th time.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (5.0)

Happy Christmas, then, for the year you wrote this, and for the Christmas that's coming up.

This was a quiet, reflective piece about family and nostalgia and displacement, as if you were grounding yourself as you thought it through. It's very personal; I feel as if I snooped by reading it.

Thank you for sharing. I can't think of any suggestions for change at all.
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Review of NEWSPAPER  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.0)

Modern life sends us so much stimulation, from all sides, and we burn out and can't react to it all. How cold we would seem to earlier generations. The juxtaposition in this between the sounds of the music and the text (s)he was looking at - I love this; it's really clever. Very witty selection of songs - (the Mother's Little Helper, was that Mary Coughlin? love her voice.)
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.5)

Honoured, thrilled, skeptical.

Next time, you'll know which is the *appropriate* emotion. Lord I hate snailspam as much as espam, and the only thing that could have made this funnier or more bitter would be a yuckier list of films - some of these appealled to me (I have uncool film taste! It's a kind of disability, don't scorn me for it)

Anyway, funny and bitter sums this piece up for me, and it's aimed at a target worthy of hatred; marketing departments that treat punters with open contempt.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (3.0)
What is your source for this, please? I'm presuming there's an official Vatican source on saints' lives but I don't know what it's called. It would have been interesting to have a little more context about anchoresses in that period, as I believe other women were walled up adjacent to churches so that they could withdraw from the world. Mostly, as I understand it, by the anchoress's own choice.

(cell in Meldola) was to be her home for remaining years of her life. But later you say she was taken to (admittedly another cell) in Mercatello. Later still, she makes a pilgramage to a healing site, so that sentence needs re-casting. Were you meaning that the intention at that point was for her never to emerge?
showed Emilia all the sick and crippled and told her it was helpless hopeless?
the nuns were more laid back and reluctant about the work that needed to be done laid back, as a description of the workshy nuns is sweetly hippyish, but disconcertingly informal within the context of this article.
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Review of Butcher Shop  
Review by ness
Rated: 13+ | (2.5)

First of all, any item tagged as melodrama + business + research is intriguing. Secondly, when the page opened, I was confronted by a daunting wodge of text - that long unindented paragraph. I nearly clicked out right there with a wail of, "my poor old eyes!" The paragraph is dialogue, too, so the convention is to break it up like this, for instance.

"How may I assist you Joe?"

Joe of charcoal gray corduroys, black hoody, glittery watch and thin metal rimmed glasses says, "A pound each of venison and beef jerky strips, and a package of eight pigs feet, if possible."

"Pigs feet? When'd you start gnawing on pigs feet, Joe?"

"Cut it out Tiny, my grandparents -

There were several sentence fragments, which were unclear in meaning.
Enter store shuffling stepping in hurry.
Who entered? The following sentence fragment told me, but when the pattern repeated, of the subject of the sentence being suppressed until later, I felt jerked around and manipulated.

Enough about presentation, content is the important thing. This butcher's shop is portrayed as a community hub, with all sorts of people coming and going. I think you almost tell us too much about these customers - too many adjectives are typed here for any of them to stick in the readers' attention.


And, quite suddenly, we're out of the butcher's and with Mencken. Two word-lists (of particularly American-type words, I wondered, given the Mencken quotations?) bookending a poem about a burning building (a burning butcher's? I was still trying to see the item holistically, and then the poem was somewhere else again) followed by another piece in the same style as the butcher shop. Fractured sentences, a fight happening, big block of text, my eyes starting to skim-read without my brain's permission (fight scenes have this effect on me when it's Tarrentino, this didn't stand a chance.)

And above, I am guilty of horrific runon sentences. They are beguiling to write and uninviting to read. But I think, based on the quotes, that this is supposed to be unintelligible to a foreigner. It is energetic, in that it has a lot of verbs, but it was too experimental for me to understand.

world feels so eschew The dictionary definition of eschew is something different from askew.
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Review of So there I was.  
Review by ness
Rated: 13+ | (4.5)
Random thoughts inspired by your travelogue, as they occurred to me:
*Bullet*Hey! I used to live in Cambridge. It was a hellhole.
*Bullet*The pub names you made up made me snigger.
*Bullet*Badly poured Guinness is a sin.
*Bullet*The exchange of questions with the bartender! Trying to gauge which of you managed to work more irritating stereotypes into the Q&A.
*Bullet*Well, yes. He does live there you know.
*Bullet*Random unholy joy that his big claim to fame is: guesting on the Simpsons.
*Bullet*Sudden, low, dirty, mean suspicion that you are Not Adhering to Fact. (Especially as I knew his PA and by her account he wasn't terribly affable.)
*Bullet*But what a story, and what fun to read it.

Actually, that accent - it sounds American to English people. Okay, robot American, but definitely not English.
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Review of No Sunday Siesta  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.5)
*Delight*

It's hard work being a mother, and what a challenge to tailor answers to "big" questions to a child's understanding.

.. And after the end of the story, all the adults had to sleep in shifts with lookouts watching for Ravi carrying matches. I was sucked in to this story, especially because of the way the family relationships gradually unfolded as it developed, rather than being stated flatly at the outset.

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Review of A Rainy Day  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.5)

I don't really understand the technicalities of poetry, but I liked this very much.

Weather reflecting emotions is so rare in life, so regular in novels, it ought to be celebrated. Rain as tears is familiar, but the obscuring clouds, fresh.

Overall it reminded me of how, at a certain stage of misery, one gets perverse satisfaction out of how grim every thing is. And then a cloudburst happens, and it's: See? See how awful my life is right now! The speaker in that poem, I felt, would have resented sunshine and puppies in their frame of mind - and the self blame seemed the most painful aspect. It implied a whole backstory, and though the emotions were clear, the facts of the case weren't told, so there was a lot of room for guessing.

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65
Review by ness
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)

Thank you for writing this article. It's a devastating subject, and I'm sorry for your personal connection. Congratulations on surviving and overcoming your experiences. The URLs for further reading are a wonderful resource.

This piece is vivid, helpful, useful and important.


The following - Now some added comments from another forum. These are my comments only, so I'm not sharing anything I shouldn't read to me like: "Edited To Add," but what forum were you talking about? Or, if you don't want to cite the forum directly, perhaps: "These extra comments arose from forum discussions" or something like that. I'd be tempted to suggest you simply included the postscripts into the article wherever they followed logically from the line of thought without saying they were additions.

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Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.0)

I was smiling when I finished reading this - what a charming story. I'm so happy for your happy ending.

"What I received back is similar to sunlight in an area deep within my mind of permanent lightlessness."
That sentence wasn't clear to me. Is similar should be was similar, but, more than that, I think the sentence needs overall recasting - though the image of brightness in an abyss is striking.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (3.5)

You seem to have made the best of an unpromising job. It's a nice memory piece, but a little bald - the vital statistics without the detail that would colour it in.

Two things you mentioned in this might have been entertainingly expanded on - the fluctuating staff, a situation which generally goes alongside vicious office politics, or the chaos of the opening day, with everyone flailing to keep all the juggling balls in the air. Or are there other incidents you remember that represent that stage in your life, music that played, how it felt to hold down a job for the first time?

What I really wanted to know more about was the outre milkshakes.
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Review of A Day in a Life  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.0)
The early parts of a piece of writing are the place where you hook in a reader. The beginning of the description of the fishing trip felt a bit generalised to me, like several fishing trip descriptions I've seen before. This sentence, The sun was rising quietly in the East had me muttering impatiently, "Well, what direction did you expect it to rise?"

The start of the dialogue was where this grabbed me. The worm was an inventive but natural way to tie the flashback and the funeral together; that was a good touch.

The best thing was the final line, a wonderful turn of phrase, evocative and true.
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Review by ness
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)

That connection sounds like an impossible experience to put across in words, and yet I think you've almost succeeded. What a beautiful inspiring and illuminating piece of writing, direct and couragous. Good luck to you. Good luck to all of us.

I am not going to comment on sentence structure. I am the typo queen today, and it would be beside the point.
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Review by ness
Rated: ASR | (4.5)


The urge to shrivel your self esteem by rating you a measley one star is very strong. Soon, (evil laugh) my ex-writing friend, your thesaurus will be in the Goodwill shop, and you'll be being machievellian in another field. Quilting, let's hope. This will leave the rest of us with less competition, as your article wisely suggests.

This sentence made me giggle. The rest of us, too intimidated to step out from behind the thick veil of anonymity we call the Internet, will need more practical tactics.

My main suggestion for improvement is something I'm guilty of myself, which may be why I'm sensitive to the fault. Purple polysyllabics, I call it when I catch myself over-writing. Hypocritically then, I'd say there are too many elaborate/polysyllabic words in this, and if you pruned out some of the adjectives, the remaining text would stand stronger for it.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (3.5)

I found the first sentence clunky - I think because "concerning" didn't fit right to my ear. If "concerning" were replaced with "based on," it still wouldn't be elegant, but it would be better. This may be a BritishEnglish versus AmericanEnglish issue.

I would disagree that she knew little of love, though she may have been an observer rather than a participant in affairs. Her letters suggest she was anything but unworldly or naive. But then again, the Austen who I love, and I love her novels very much, is writing not about romance, but autonomy for women, a kind of moral self-determination. Marriage was the one career open to women of that age and class, so - wedding bells to close the story.

I wish you had written more about her books in this article. Why is it that her novels are still read for pleasure, while her contemporaries are forgotten? Those who dislike her say her books are all the same, but surely the heroines' unique qualities give each story a different tone. Do you, personally, like her books, and if so, why? If you don't, why again?

You praise her dialogue and social commentary - examples would strengthen your point.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.5)


But I love passive!!!!!! Reviewers here make it too much of a bogeyman, in my opinion.

(See all those exclamation marks above? Bad.)

You certainly amused me, even on the one item that I disagreed with, and you get 5 stars on the clarity of communication issue which is the foremost thing in articles. I thought there were too many font sizes and colours and ML going on for so short an article, but that is a subjective aesthetic issue.

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Review of Telephone Lines  
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.0)

Distance and connection, both, in one image. I liked this poem. There was one line "too loved for strength" which I couldn't work out, couldn't see how it fitted in or what you were saying at that point. But the pictures the rest painted in my head very much worked.
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Review by ness
Rated: E | (2.5)

I kept stopping paying attention to the emotion of the story because I couldn't work out the timescale, or the sequence of events. The tenses jump from past to present to past again. When Fleur's brother is dead beside her she says she was happy two seconds ago - too abrupt, surely?

This could be a strong story, but it's very confused right now. And, I know, confusion must be how it was on that night, but to make a story out of it, you need to untangle things a little.

I most certainly didn’t want woken up then. There are missing words here.
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75
Review by ness
Rated: E | (4.0)

I loved the unity of this piece, it all held together, but it didn't feel repetitive. It felt very vivid, lots of sight and sound and texture.

A couple of phrases stopped me in a bad way: affinity for what? is the thought that (unkindly) halted me in the second paragraph. That's a grammar nazi commenting, as you can tell.

And the way the full stops fell choked the momentum of the text, so it was a bit stop-and-starty, but that may be me not the poem. Free verse is a ghastly tricky thing to pull off.
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