Young Writers Society

Just for fun.



Smartly scamper ye long haired bilge rats!
Yer scurvy, pink toes cross creaky floorboards.
Lads done hornswagger'd me gold encrusted pot-pie;
dropping crumbs 'round the poop deck, scurrying
away t'wards Cap'n's chambers with yer big, oogle eyes
and snuffling little snouts. Ye drunken scalleywags,
downin' all me sweet Welch's rum, drawn yer X's on me walls!
I shall have ye jailed, scrambling without supper
fer thievin' all of mummy's duffle: me phone, me watch,
ye no good miscreants tooken 'em all flushed down the loo,
straight to Davy Jones' locker!

I really liked this poem. I enjoyed the way it was written and the humour of it. It was amazing and I can find no problems in it. Overall, I really enjoyed it and found it quite interesting.

To Audy; here as so kindly requested.

Of course, I have one problem with reviewing things like this, and that is the fact that it's so difficult to give a funny poem a serious review.

So, yeah, brace yourself for shortness and things that I'm just forcing myself to think about. *cracks knuckles and attempts to do something reviewer-ly*

So, first of all I'll mention readability. The pirate slang was easy enough to follow, but the line-cuts made everything difficult to grasp. They were all in such weird places, and the lack of separate stanzas added to the squint in my eyes as I tried to separate one line from another. The flow was affected by this in a grave sort of way, and it made it sound choppy. So yeah.... I'd try looking into moving some of those words around a bit. 

Second point- the wordiness of it all. There are so.... many.... words. @.@ That's not usually a bad thing, but in this case, it was. Why? Because the words seemed more like stuffing than anything else, and the slang sounded a bit forced in areas- like you're just trying to show off how much pirate-prattle you know. And by the way, nobody likes a braggart. *cough* Not that I think that that was your intention or anything.... just something to watch out for is all, I suppose.

Of course, this could all just be my exhausted, desperate attempt at trying to find something negative to point put, and may be disregarded. You know. If you feel as though you should disregard it. *face/desk*

Overall, though, you have yourself quite the comedy going on here. There was much in awesome, even though I tried (and probably failed) to point out a few little things, it truly did draw a smile from my pirate-y lips. 

Yar, keep writin', ye scallywag!
-Cap'n Isha (aka, the undercover pirate)

Hey Audy,

Sorry for not reviewing this earlier. I was a bit busy the last few days. But, here's my review as promised.

I find no mistakes, but here's one thing I want to point out. You seem to intermixed modern day language with the classical pirate slang. I know that there's no timeline for those, but still they feel like they don't belong within a poem almost all the way written in pirate slang.

I shall have ye jailed, scrambling without supper
fer thievin' all of mummy's duffle: me phone, me watch,

Just think about this as if it's a film. Would a phone or watch blend into the rest of the environment. In my opinion, it would be highlighted as clearly as blood on snow.

em all flushed down the loo,

This is acceptable, but still feels rather odd to me. I don't know if it seem alright to anyone else, but still once you read the words on the poem out loud, you feel odd as those words are normal words used in day to day language while the rest are pirate slang.

Before saying a way to correct this, let me also point out this. In my opinion, I feel like there's too much pirate slang in this. Because, the pirate slang is accentuated by the way the words are said, not by the words themselves. So, changing "your" to "yer" or "for" to "fer" is acceptable, but writing almost all of the pirate phrases compressed into a few lines is going to sound forced. So, I'd say, mix this with normal phrases, adding just the right amount of pirate slang necessary to make this funny and piratey

Reducing the amount of pirate slang would also help the above problem I mentioned, because against the backdrop of normal language, those would not sound odd or stand out too much.

Now, as this is humor invoking poem, I'm not going into the message or the meaning of the poem. So, it was a good poem and was humorous, but it can do with some improvement.

Good luck

- C -