Wikipedia:Peer review/Goodbye to Language/archive1

Goodbye to Language

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because a lot of work has gone into it and 1) I'd like to see it get promoted, but more importantly 2) its a difficult film and I was hoping to get feedback on how much sense it makes as an article. If at all possible, I'd love to hear reviews of the Synopsis section from someone who has seen the film and another from someone who has not.

Thanks, Deoliveirafan (talk) 10:25, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Drive-by comments by Tezero

• The sentences in Synopsis are quite short and choppy; I'd recommend melding some together with conjunctions and gerunds to make it flow better.
• Who's Davidson?
• "Roxy the dog" - optional if you feel it's unclear, but you may want to remove "the dog" since you've already specified
• "Roxy, a stray dog, happens upon them and they adopt him" - Roxy is adopted by both couples?
• You're right; Synopsis is confusing; it took me a couple reads to really grasp what was going on. I would suggest reorganizing some of the information in the first paragraph to make it clearer that it's essentially the same story told twice, interspersed, but with different couples. Perhaps something like this would do the trick:

Goodbye to Language tells two similar versions of a romance narrative in an interspersed format; these two stories are named "1 Nature" and "2 Metaphor", and they respectively focus on the couples Gedeon and Josette, and Marcus and Ivitch. In each story, ...

THEN, after a brief summary of the general narrative, start explaining what happens in each one individually. Actually, this is an unorthodox idea, but you might want to use two columns and tell the story separately in each one. Tezero (talk) 18:52, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

I can work on most of these later this week, and you're right it wasn't made completely clear that the story was repeating itself. One problem: although I remember Roxy being adopted by both couples, many of the articles I cited have commented that it is unclear if the second couple adopts Roxy. But that doesn't seem very appropriate to explain in the Synopsis section. So I just wrote it as it currently is.--Deoliveirafan (talk) 06:30, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

I worked on this and think its better. So much of the story (Davidson is a professor, the man once stabbed the woman) is implied and not bluntly stated, so it is a difficult section to write. What about the rest of the article?--Deoliveirafan (talk) 20:02, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. Yeah, it's an improvement. A general theme I'm noticing is that the article seems unusually detailed - do we really need five paragraphs on the works referenced in this film? I'd think one or two would suffice. Same with Themes - I can't imagine that much has really been written about this film to justify a section rivaling/exceeding what the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Kerouac, Charlotte Bronte, Luo Guanzhong, and the Beatles would get. Tezero (talk) 20:44, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

I could trim it some more, but I'm not sure about your rational for doing so. The film has several themes and including them is comprehensive. The references are a major part of it so I think that a casual reader would find it very useful to be able to explore all of them. The point of these references is not the fact that there are many references in the film, the point is the meaning behind them and their individual content. Each reference has a purpose and is a character in the film. Anything else? Clarity, grammar?--Deoliveirafan (talk) 02:34, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

This article also received a review when it was successfully nominated as a DYK, so I'm fine to close this request now unless someone else has something to suggest.--Deoliveirafan (talk) 02:12, 27 February 2015 (UTC)