Instructor Comments on Draft/Peer Review 2

KJ18818 thanks for your comprehensive peer review, and for the time you took to go through your peer's sentences with a fine-toothed comb. You can see from their comment in response that they appreciate it! Grade: 15/15 Gardneca (talk) 11:15, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sizer25 good work continuing to add content and to organize/reorganize your sections. I know this is a work in progress and you still have a couple weeks to play around with this, but I really want you to pay attention to the overall theme of your peer's suggestions, and my previous comments. Ultimately: content = good, presentation = confusing. You say yourself that you are going to continue to chop up these long, convoluted sentences, and I trust that you will work hard on this over the coming weeks. Remember, above all, that this is Wikipedia not an essay. You need to have concise, factual sentences that provide information not opinions - take out that flowery language. Your best, most 'Wikipedia-esque' section is the final one, on Neopythagoreanism. Read that one over again to get a sense of tone and delivery and try to emulate throughout. So, you've done a really impressive job so far, and you have to keep at it over the next few weeks to get this page where you want it to be: take your peer reviewer's suggestions and incorporate them, keep thinking about organization as your peer suggested, and keep writing! I think you should write a new lead, once you get to the stage of the final draft, so that you can write something short and sweet that encompasses everything that's actually on your page, while your current 'lead' can likely become a 'History' or 'Greek Influence' section. Keep up the amazing work and let me know if you have any questions! Grade: 14/15 Gardneca (talk) 11:15, 24 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Peer Review 2

Sizer25 Hi! Overall, I think you’ve added some really interesting content, and essentially creating your article from scratch is an impressive undertaking, so good job! I have a few suggestions mostly relating to improving the flow of your draft in order to make it a bit easier to follow. The first thing I’ve noticed is that you tend to write fairly long sentences, which can be a bit confusing when trying to digest all this new information. Here are the main parts where I think this could be cleared up:

“Such was the case of Seneca the Younger, who while mostly practiced Stoicism, and is primarily known as a Stoic philosopher”

I would revise this sentence to make it shorter and so it flows together more cohesively, i.e “Such was the case of Seneca the Younger, who is primarily known as a Stoic philosopher despite mostly practicing Stoicism. Seneca the Younger also lived according to…”

“Key characteristics of the two most popular schools of philosophy at the time, Epicureanism and Stoicism, that could have likely had been an influence on the behavior of those Romans who followed said teachings could have been the hedonism (not to be confused with the pejorative) of Epicureanism and the emotional attuning of Stoicism.[5]”

This sentence is a bit bulky and difficult to follow, I would break it up and perhaps rearrange some of the word order, for example: “Key characteristics of the two most popular schools of philosophy at the time (Epicureanism and Stoicism) could have been the hedonism of Epicureanism and the emotional attuning of Stoicism. These characteristics likely could have influenced the behavior of Romans who followed said teachings.”

Of course this is just a quick example of how you could word it, so feel free to change it up or use it as a base template!

“As for the Stoics, both the senator Seneca the Younger and the emperor Marcus Aurelius reference practicing Stoic psychological techniques, revealing that not only did the Stoics impact legal thought, as in the case of the senators Cato the Younger and Cicero, but that their teachings did in fact guide the daily interactions of those who chose to follow them.”

This sentence is also quite long, I would break it up by separating the sentence ending in “stoic psychological techniques” and “revealing that…” – in favour of “This revealed that…” or something similar.

“Both a more cosmopolitan and sexually intimate viewpoint[6] a quantifiable difference between the Roman era philosophers and their Greek counterparts.”

“…sexually intimate viewpoint. This was a quantifiable difference…”

“Stoics such as Musonius Rufus describe a natural form of relationships between the sexes that stands in contrast to the teachings of early Greek Stoic leaders such as Zeno, which also happens to confirm to an overall societal difference in perspective on sexuality between the Greeks and the Romans, but which also indicates a shift in perspective on the Stoic school in particular."

Here I would separate the first two parts i.e “Stoics such as Musoniun Rufus describe a natural form of relationship between the sexes that stands in contrast to the teachings of early Greek Stoic leaders such as Zeno. This not only confirms an overall societal difference in perspective on sexuality between the Greeks and the Romans, but also indicates…”

“and, as is argued by Epicurus, the founder of the school, in doing so one will live the best life.”

I’d look over the wording here and possibly rearrange the sentence as the amount of commas makes it a bit hard to follow.

A couple of smaller remarks, either stylistic or grammar related:

“Unique developments and growth” is a bit redundant, perhaps remove “and growth,” or specify a distinction between what is meant by distinction / growth.

“academies concluded their practices, although, it was also during this period”

Here you could add a period after practices and start the next sentence either with “Although,” or straight to “It was also…”

“logical inability of the Hellenistic gods to have possibly have been responsible”

“to possibly have been”

“also derived their understanding of ethics heavily from”

“Heavily derived their understanding of ethics from…”

“which also happens to confirm to an overall societal difference in”

Here I’m not sure whether this should be “which also happens to confirm an overall societal difference” or “which also happens to conform an overall societal difference”

"and held tenants such as the world being comprised of numbers and of the importance of the symbology of numbers, as well as vegetarianism, as all life was regarded as being precious in the philosophy's tenants."

I think the word “Tenant” should be replaced with “Tenet”

Tl;Dr Revise punctuation: some commas are missing, while others are unnecessary (throughout the article) and some sentences are long and bulky.

Finally, I would also consider reorganizing your sections a bit, by making a “Schools of thought” Section, followed by the subsections on epicureanism, stoicism, etc, and then the characteristics as another subsection, followed by the list of philosophers.

All in all you’ve added some really great content, I would just revise the grammar and word choice/order to make it more cohesive. Good work so far & good luck with the rest of the draft! KJ18818 (talk) 23:02, 12 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

response

Whoops, didnt realize I was meant to also respond on the talk page. I already included the edits. I want to say, thank you! you did a great review, and really did a ton of editing work for me, it almost doesnt seem fair. I typically write sentences that are 3 or 4 concepts in one, then I have to edit them 3 times to trim them down to proper size sentences, so I apologize that you had to read through those haha. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sizer25 (talk • contribs) 18:29, 17 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Instructor Comments on Peer Review/Draft 1

Sizer25 really great job adding content so far. Your peer reviewer left you some [on this page], and I'd like you to take their suggestions of adding content and sections seriously, since the original Roman philosophy page was so bad that you are essentially creating a new page from scratch. Use this as an opportunity to write a lot about a topic that you clearly love and hold dear! My suggestions going forward are as follows:

Remember that any info contained in your lead should also appear elsewhere in the article - so based on the lead as it stands, I would expect sections on Greek origins of philosophy (Epicureanism and Stoicism), philosophy in law/politics, and Aristotelean influence. Your audience, remember, knows nothing about this topic, so don't assume knowledge on anything - even if it seems really obvious, like the academy
Characteristics section - take a 'divide and conquer' approach to your writing here. Think about what sections you think would best represent Roman philosophy, and chop up this unwieldy section into smaller, more organized sub-headings. Perhaps organize this chronologically, or by school - maybe both! What if you had a section for each school, and then within each school you had a subsection about the history, a subsection about beliefs/practices, and then concluded with famous practitioners? This would be beautifully organized, consistent, and clear - remember, the final appearance of this page is up to you, you are the architect. Ultimately, however, your big challenge this week is adding a LOT more content while meticulously organizing it.
Philosophers by School - I love this section, it's neat and organized and a really helpful list. Good job.

Keep saying to yourself over and over 'Imagine that I know nothing about Roman philosophy, does this make sense? What else would I want to know'? Work hard, I'm really looking forward to seeing how this transforms! Great job so far! Grade: 17/20 Gardneca (talk) 11:44, 4 March 2020 (UTC) Updated correction: Sizer25 I just checked the history of your page and most of the content I just graded was added from Feb 27-March 3, so I must take some marks away for late submission, since your draft as on Feb 23 (the due date) would have received a failing grade. Your updated mark to reflect the late submission is 12/20 (-1 for every day late). Gardneca (talk) 11:58, 4 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Article Evaluation

Sizer25 you make some good points about your article in this review, and with such a short article there should be LOTS to critique! I like that you've incorporated the sources you intend to use to improve this article, but your evaluation is more of a list of improvements you'd like to make rather than a clear review of all the questions asked in the assignment. One of the reasons a template was provided was so that you would be able to follow the guidelines easily and answer all the questions clearly. If there's any confusion about these assignments in the future, please do let me know! Again, what you produced isn't necessarily bad or wrong, it's just not exactly an evaluation of the article - the point of the evaluation is to allow you to develop an eye for all the ways in which Wikipedia articles can be improved. You definitely have some good steps outlined, though, and I think you will make some significant improvements to this page. Grade: 7/10. Gardneca (talk) 20:46, 5 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Annotated Bibliography

Sizer25 you've got some good sources here, and it's clear that you know quite a bit about your topic already. However, I would like to see a bit more organization - your annotated bibliography reads like stream-of-consciousness, whereas I asked for exactly what you would use from each source and how that would be added to the existing Wikipedia article. Be careful not to take on too much, since Roman Philosophy is quite an expansive topic, and organize your strategy for tackling this page. What new sections will you add? What will you prioritize? Grade: 9/10 Gardneca (talk) 16:15, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]