Talk:The Fair Maid of Perth

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The entire plot summary reads as if someone took every 10th or 20th line of the book and wrote it verbatim. I have not read the story and the summary sounds like it is reminding a person about the book's plot when it should sound like it is explaining to someone with no prior knowledge instead. It's hard to follow (or at least it is for me) for multiple reasons. A few are: when a comment refers back to something that previously happened, it isn't clear as to what the previous event was; it frequently uses "him" or "her" without enough information to know who "him" or "her" is; new characters are introduced without any background explaining who they are; and too many more problems to list. If I read the book I'm sure this would be an excellent way to refresh my memory about it. Since I haven't, I'm honestly just confused by it instead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by PredaClone (talk • contribs) 13:25, 16 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistent spelling of her name

The title character's name appears 25 times in this article. In nine case, it is spelled Catharine; in the other 16 Catherine. In the book, it is always spelled with an a (at least, in the edition that I read). I can go ahead and change every instance of Catherine to Catharine in the article, but I thought I would check here first, in case anyone knows a good reason not to do this. -- Mike Marchmont (talk) 18:50, 6 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Both spellings are valid. The 'e' spelling is adopted by the Edinburgh Edition as Scott's consistent MS spelling, where the original compositors preferred the 'a' spelling. It's not up to Wikipedia to standardise.

Thanks, @Geierstein41:, for that clarification - very helpful. I see you also added an explanation to the main article. -- Mike Marchmont (talk) 07:48, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The point about the summary is fair, but that's one good reason for having the chapter summary as well. People can choose which they prefer. Geierstein41 (talk)