wizerd

TOPICAL TACTICS 1:
Find your enemies weak point. by ~DVS~

I’m just going to be writing small articles on keys to winning battling to help everyone’s level step up. The first week is about using people’s flaws against them.

There is one key to winning against an opponent who is going to be a challenge. If you doubt your faith in winning the best tactic to use is; find your opponents weakness and exploit it.

Everyone has a weakness in topical writing. Some can only write abstract poetry and get ripped when they try and go toe to toe with someone who spits raw. Others may only be able to spit raw and find themselves unable to match the metaphors and intelligence of your piece. It works both ways you just need to ensure your piece is seen as the one that sets the benchmark with the opponents trying to live up to it.

Some people have writing issues. My favourite flaw to exploit is flow. If someone has weak flow and you come through with an ill delivery even if your content isn’t as good it’ll seem so much better.

The whole idea of how this works is basically once you’ve found an opponents weakness you produce it as ill as possible and over the top in your verse so that your opponents looks amateurish in comparison. Perhaps they write simple so go overload your verse with imagery and description.

There is always a tactic to be employed in topical battles.




TOPICAL TACTICS 2:
How to Never Lose. by ~DVS~

Im not guarantying this will always work but i can tell you it does most of the time.

I'll draw on my older battles as an example.

Last week i talked about exploiting a person’s weakness. And i will quote one point i made cause it summarizes what im saying this week.

"Everyone has a weakness in topical writing. Some can only write abstract poetry and get ripped when they try and go toe to toe with someone who spits raw. Others may only be able to spit raw and find themselves unable to match the metaphors and intelligence of your piece. It works both ways you just need to ensure your piece is seen as the one that sets the benchmark with the opponents trying to live up to it."

Watching gehoisfat i knew before even i battled him that he would 80% drop a voice do with the black race. And he did. It was the racism through time one if you remember. To combat this i couldve tried to go toe to toe with his story or topic but i didnt my tactic was to do the opposite drop some raw flow, metaphors something everyone will dig. What i hoped this would achieve is everyone would be so caught up in the complexity of his piece that dropping such a different raw piece would jolt them and trick them into voting for me. And it worked suckers. lol only rc saw the tactic.

When i versed merc i knew he would come raw and simplistic so i decided to do the opposite drop complex imagery layered with wit and try and give the appearance that merc verse was dramatically simplistic. That worked as well.

And against rc well. lol it didnt work but i think i'll explain the tactic anyway i had two options leading into the battle in my mind. Right hardcore imagery storyline and try to match him which i was 90% sure that was teh verse he would drop so i took a risk and went for a simple down to earth rhyme with a little clever metaphor unfortunetly rc rhymes were to powerful to ignore. What this proves is this my tactic plan of battling doesnt always work. But i will tell you this it does work the easier the opponent is cause the more straight forward the tactic you need to employ to win.
The harder they are the more complex it becomes cause sometimes there is a series of tactics you then need to employ and winning then becomes a gamble of choosing the right one. I think ive learnt now that the harder they are such as people like rc you just have to write a good topical that you know is good and ignore what you think they will do.

All in all this just the way i write for the league. write the best verse or the verse you enjoy every week if that’s what you want to do. This is just something i thought id educate people to show them it can be treated like a sport and in sport you can have a game plan. Though i think for the next few weeks i might cool off and just write.

wizerd

TOPICAL TACTICS 3:
The Rectification of Wording Problems of Verses
By Richard Corey

I once said there was one thing that could kill a topical, the perceived lack of flow. Well, I was wrong, there are TWO things that can kill a topical, the other being bad wording.
I hate bad wording. I mean, I hate bad wording with a passion. You can have the nicest looking verse, great flow, great idea…but then have forced multies and bad sentence structure. There you are, reading a nice verse, then all of a sudden someone uses a verb wrong for the sake of a multie and it’s like a fuckin’ fist in the face! It just stops you cold. For the voters it must be like swimming through mud. So to help out, I’m going to try my best to point out some of the immediate and obvious problems that cause bad wording.

Using Words Wrong.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Judge Mental
There is no heaven for you… no religious support
Your left with nothing but forgiveness,
when your forced to witness your abort

Yep, it happens to the best of us. You want that rhyme sooooo bad. You know the word that you want to use, and it means what you want it to mean…kinda. I feel your pain lyricists; trust me, I do. There have been many a time where I’ve drop kicked the English language in the forehead for the sake of a rhyme scheme, but that shows lack of lyrical discipline. No matter how close you think a word is to the meaning your line necessitates, if it’s wrong IT WILL NOT WORK. You can’t conjugate it, you can’t use a different tense, can’t use a different part of speech, it just WILL NOT WORK.

Sometimes when I come up on a lyrical road block of this type, I just change the rhyme scheme in both lines all together. Other times, I may decide to keep the rhyme scheme in the first line, but switch to another in the second line. Whatever you choose to do, the key is to make your wording sound as natural as possible.

Using Words in Unnatural Ways.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Menace
im dwelling under the dirt, waiting to crumble the earth

This culprit here sneaks up on you because technically, you’ve done nothing wrong. You can “crumble” something. I can “crumble” a cookie, so I’m sure if you’re strong enough you can “crumble” the earth…but when was the last time you actually heard someone say they’re about to “crumble” something? I mean, in a real sentence. The thing is, something can crumble, or fall apart, but I’ve rarely heard anyone say they’re going to actively crumble something. This is a situation when the definition is right, but due to the fact that people don’t use it in this manner normally the line comes off sounding wrong; even if its not. This problem is similar to the last issue in that they both are mostly due to maintaining a strict rhyme scheme. To combat this, writers may do what they do for “Using the Wrong Words,” they may also want to stay away from words to which they don’t readily know the meaning.

Using Incorrect Sentence Structure.
A big problem I see writers falling victim to is bad sentence structure. We, as fans of hip-hop music, have become accustomed to hearing verses a certain way. In the average hip-hop song, there is little to no sentence structure, but because of the medium’s nature the emcee’s delivery and emphasis can make up for this downside.

Unfortunately, we as writers don’t have that freedom. Things have to make sense as read on a sheet of paper. This time, rather than point out someone who I see guilty of this infraction, I’ll show what I try to do to avoid it. I write all of my verses, or at least I try, as if they were stretched out in paragraph form. In my head, I view each line break as either a period or semi-colon, unless another form of punctuation.

In the end it looks like this:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Corey
One casual kiss of the clavicle bone…
and I’ve passed through the grips of the trappings at home
I cross the line…to her hips and dark, saccharine moans
a shadowy road that I’m happy I won’t travel alone.
We’ll walk the forbidden, disjointed slopes and turns
into hidden pastures, pass the points of no return.
Inebriated from the mixing of spirits…
Lord, if you can hear this – please anoint my soul, it burns
with a fiery lust, I can’t see her without dying to touch
the insides of her clutch, it’s almost suicidal I thrust
each stabbing stroke half kills me, the violence of love
is unmatched, but still…I look into her eyes and I must
kiss the deep well of her lips, I wrestle them prone
and make a wish with a tone barely echoed at home.

However, stretched out into paragraph form, with the proper punctuation, it looks like this:

Quote:
One casual kiss of the clavicle bone… and I’ve passed through the grips of the trappings at home. I cross the line…to her hips and dark, saccharine moans; a shadowy road that I’m happy I won’t travel alone. We’ll walk the forbidden, disjointed slopes and turns into hidden pastures, pass the points of no return. Inebriated from the mixing of spirits…Lord, if you can hear this – please anoint my soul, it burns with a fiery lust, I can’t see her without dying to touch the insides of her clutch, it’s almost suicidal I thrust.
Each stabbing stroke half kills me, the violence of love is unmatched, but still…I look into her eyes and I must kiss the deep well of her lips, I wrestle them prone and make a wish with a tone barely echoed at home.

If you can’t stretch out your verse like this and have it make sense, chances are you have bad wording. However, if you stick with these tips, you can work things out.

MurkinDem

Thankyou this covers all the main points, richard corey is awesome.