Wikipedia:Peer review/Mary Wollstonecraft/archive1

Mary Wollstonecraft

This article has been rewritten from scratch due to plagarism issues. The current version should hopefully meet all of the Featured Article criteria. It has already been approved as a Good Article and has improved even more since then. The referencing and comprehensiveness are excellent. I'm mainly looking for problems in the prose, i.e. discontinuities, confusing passages, awkward wording, etc. Broader suggestions regarding organization and emphasis are certainly welcome as well. No automated suggestions please. Kaldari 04:59, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello again. Taking another look at the article, I'm impressed by how far you've come since my GA review at the beginning of the month. I'm not sure how much help I'll be, since I've already gone over it once, but here goes:

• Examine the prose for unnecessary words. As an example, a sentence in the lead reads: "In addition to Wollstonecraft's literary work, her life itself has been a topic of considerable interest due to her struggle against numerous hardships and her unconventional, and often tumultuous, relationships." This could be rewritten: "Wollstonecraft's life has been a topic of interest to [historians? scholars? feminists?] because of the hardships she faced and her unconventional, and often tumultuous, relationships." The introductory phrase is not needed because the preceding and succeeding paragraphs deal with her literary work; "itself" is not needed; "considerable" is something of a weasel word and not needed; "numerous" is not needed. If you would like, I'd be happy to offer to copyedit for these instances -- I know firsthand how difficult it can be to see them in your own writing -- but it might take me some time to do so.
  • I added the introductory phrase ("In addition to Wollstonecraft's literary work") as an afterthought to try to make the transition between the two paragraphs flow better, but I suppose it's really not needed. Your wording seems much cleaner, so I'll try to switch to something closer to that. I'll look through the rest of it as well and try to clean out any unnecessary words. Let me know if you notice any other passages in particular.
• More proofreading stuff: minor grammar and punctuation issues. For instance, "Her early advocacy of women's equality, and her attacks on..." shows an unnecessary comma. There doesn't seem to be a lot of this, though.
  • Noted. I'll try to proofread for this...
• More examples of awkward phrasing, redundancy, or weasel words, from the Early Life section: "he appears to have been a violent man", "Wollstonecraft also played this protective maternal role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life.", "she convinced and helped her sister Eliza", "With this action, Wollstonecraft demonstrated that she was willing to challenge social norms, but the human costs were severe: her sister was doomed to a life of poverty and hard work (as she could not remarry) as well as social condemnation.", "Wollstonecraft credited Fanny with opening her mind to new possibilities; in the end, though, she discovered that she had idealized Fanny, but she remained dedicated to her and her family.", "Fanny had become engaged and after her husband, Hugh Skeys, took her to the continent to improve her health,[6] she became pregnant and her health worsened; Wollstonecraft followed in 1785 to nurse her."
  • Great examples. You should be a professional editor :)
  • This is exactly the kind of thing that was getting me down before.

1) "appears to have been" is necessary because we have only Wollstonecraft's word for it 2) "throughout her life" emphasizes Wollstonecraft's life-long efforts to financially and emotionally assist her sisters (although sometimes this was unwelcome help) 3) "convinced" and "helped" do not mean the same thing 4) Wollstonecraft's relationships were not simple and cannot be explained simply nor do I think her relationship with Fanny should be explained this way. "First, Wollstonecraft credited Fanny with opening her mind to new possibilities. Then, Wollstonecraft realized she had idealized Fanny. Finally, Wollstonecraft remainded dedicated to Fanny and her family despite that realization." Awadewit 18:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

• "The First of a New Genus" -- All words in the section header except the first should be lowercased, unless they were capitalized in the quote. The quoted text in the body of the section doesn't share the capitalization, so I assume they were not. The same is true of "Memoirs" and "Works" in the respective section headers.
  • Fixed.

Why is this? I would think that section headings would be capitalized in this way to draw attention to them. Most American publishing companies use this capitalization style in subheadings. Cambridge University Press, a British publishing company, for example, uses the lower case version and it is usually associated with them. Awadewit 18:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

This is just Wikipedia convention. I'm not sure where it first came from. Kaldari 19:12, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

• Add ISBNs to the "Further Reading" and "References" where possible. Add "accessed on" dates to any weblinks.
  • Will do.
• In general, go through the manual of style and make sure the article follows it pretty closely. I think it does, but I might be missing something. Shimeru 04:46, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Thanks for all your suggestions! They are all extremely helpful. Kaldari 07:34, 29 December 2006 (UTC)