| Pcomment
| - Red links hurt my eyes. I'm also someone who cares a lot about the aesthetics of a page , so your red, blue, bolds and italics make the article very messy to look at. However I know that they're a formatting requirement. I couldn't find any spelling or grammar mistakes, but that might just be because I wasn't looking carefully. Anyway, as usual, read the article out loud to yourself to spot any mistakes.
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| Icomment
| - They were ok. But why do they have a yellow tint? Anyway, you have the right amount of images in the right places, and they fit the article nicely, but they are not an independent source of humour for me. They just compliment the article somewhat. It's easier said than done when I tell someone to "find funnier images" or "get funnier captions", but I'm gonna tell you anyway. However, most UnNews images are not funny unless that article is really good, and a lot of feature articles have images that are not that funny, saved by the humour in the text.
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| Hcomment
| - I think this is a good concept, however, one flaw stopped me from enjoying the rest of your article. This flaw is found in the introduction, and I think there might be many factors contributing to it. Firstly, I expected this to be a satire on America's healthcare debate, as usual. This was not the case, which is actually sort of good, because it's more original. However, this means that all my contextual knowledge became moot. For the first few paragraphs I struggled to figure out what you're actually satirising. When I finally did, I thought it was a good concept, but I missed all the opportunities for laughter while reading through your article for the first time. I didn't laugh when I reread it for the second time, because I rarely do, unless it's an article that's really, really good. So that was why I didn't enjoy it as much as I potentially could. Second point is that I did not think I have the background knowledge to know if what you're satirising in the article is actually the case in real life. I am somewhat familiar with the Australian health system, since I will work in it in a few years if everything goes well, but I don't actually know much about the American system other than the most publicised aspects. For instance, I don't know if Alabama patients are known for making unreasonable demands, because I didn't think normal patients are usually like that. Even though I understand you're exaggerating. Third point, I don't understand, and your article did not make this clear, how fulfilling outlandish wishes will cut costs or increase profit. Is one much cheaper than the other? Is the hospital going to ship in the severed elephant trunk, while charging the patient the same as they would for a full round of chemo? It's just these little cause and effect details that bother me, so I guess I'm more of a content freak than I thought. Also I don't understand why, in the first half of the article you say that doctors are not going to bother treating patients anymore, just fulfill their outlandish wishes, because this will be save money. Then in the second half of the article you say, the hospital encourages unhealthy practices because this will generate more patients, and treating them will make more money for the hospital. This, imo, is a contradiction. "the GDP goes up" - GDP I believe stands for gross domestic product, the measure of economic output for a country - I think you mean hospital budget here, or something of that nature.
Ok, that seems like a lot of criticism, but they are not criticisms of your humour, just criticisms of your details that prevented me from enjoying your humour. This article is not actually that bad, and concept number 1 and concept number 2 are both pretty good. But since it is in my opinion that they contradict each other, I would suggest you just focus on one and tone down the other. I personally like concept number 2 better, and I will deal with this further in concept.
I think most of your detail problems stem from an introduction that's not strong enough. It doesn't establish the context, and doesn't tell the reader about real life elements that this parodies. When writing articles it's very good to drop details as if they are truths, and let the reader build on those assumptions. An article that does this exceptionally well is West Timor, which seems to satirise real life events, but actually does not, but is written in such a way that an uninformed reader who reads it will assume that it's representation of West Timor is the truth. I'm not saying to follow it's example, but if you're building your jokes on facts that not many people are sure if they're true, you should establish them in such a way that the reader would believe you. This art is actually very hard to master.
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