User talk:Samgriff/sandbox

draft comments

Hi @Samgriff: I'm providing online support for your class at UMD and I have a few comments on your draft:

• I've found a few sources covering Moorehead (mostly her work):
  • ISBN 0207179484 may be useful (as there appears to be a chapter on Moorehead's detective fiction, though from the looks of it the book will be tough to find.
  • Hogan, E. (2013). 'A Mob of Bloody Women'--Utopia,Collectivity and Multiplicity in Some Recent Fiction by Australian Women. Journal Of The Association For The Study Of Australian Literature goes into detail about Remember the Tarantella, though it may be useful to you in establishing the feminist context for some of her work.
  • Kalnins, P. (2013). Good Writing: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fiction. Journal Of The Association For The Study Of Australian Literature has one more layer of indirection. It's a bit of refereeing on various critiques (including Moorehead's) of The Hand that Signed the Paper (Helen Darville's novel, not the Dylan Thomas poem :) ). I don't know if it will be useful to you but it was interesting to read.
  • Susan Hawthorne uses Remember the Tarantella to anchor a discussion of feminist literature.
  • There are a few other sources out there but it looks like finding them will involve a considerable amount of digging and inter-library loan work, so I won't list all of them.
• I would take a look at Janise Yntema for an example of the basic tone and structure you want to emulate in a wikipedia article on a subject like this. Worth noting: the first section (or "lead") of a wikipedia article doesn't need a section heading and rather than "biography", it's often easier to to split the article into sections like "education", "career", etc. That may or may not work for you, but I'd experiment a bit with it.
• Also terms like Mornington, Victoria can be "wikilinked" as can Adelaide Writers' Week (which I believe is the "Adelaide Writers' Festival"). This helps build the web between wikipedia articles and gives readers some context for the article without ballooning the prose.
• this link (your current fn. 3) should be changed to a permanent link to a particular resource. Right now it links to a "tag" on a blog, which will update as new posts are added with that tag. Remember that a reader expects to be able to verify claims made on wikipedia using the cited sources. If we say that "One of Moorhead's most popular pieces of work.." is Remember the Tarantella, a reader clicking through to the source expects to see a specific article supporting that claim. Linking to individual articles also helps us note the author (if we meant to link to this post, the author is Marilyn Dell Brady and the citation should note that).
• Also, I don't see that the cited source supports the claim that Tarantella is Moorehead's most popular work. From my research above it appears that Tarantella is certainly widely discussed in the literature, but we should be careful to not make claims that we can't directly support to a hypothetical critical reader (as an actual critical reader may challenge those claims or remove them!)

I think this is a good start and can be improved by including some additional sources. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks! Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:46, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

You may also want to consider copying over the content from the existing Finola Moorhead article and making improvements from there. There is well-cited and well-written content, with wikilinks and a longer list of works - so that you wouldn't be starting from scratch. Your article would need to get integrated with this one at some point anyway. Then, if you could look for content that's not already covered, that would be great.--CaroleHenson (talk) 05:18, 10 November 2014 (UTC)