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The Guardian of Education

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This article on Sarah Trimmer's eighteenth-century journal for reviewing children's books has recently passed GA. I do not believe that it is appropriate material for FA (there is not enough published scholarship to merit a "comprehensive" claim), but I do want to make sure that the article is as good as it can be, so I am soliciting reviews of it. Please comment on accessibility and prose, in particular. Thanks. Awadewit | talk 10:51, 17 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well I hosed it up with a boatload of comments... for my two cents, the writing style is a bit subtle and the vocabulary perhaps a bit highbrow-ish, considering that hordes of people will be reading it. Maybe that's OK; I can name two or three Wikipedians who would love it ;-) I saw dashes that looked like ndashes but I thought should have been ems; I really need to commit WP:MOS to memory. Still needs more wikilinking. Is this perhaps relevant to Educational perennialism? As i was reading, all the author's fears of liberal hordes etc. made me wonder if that was a period of instability in British history.. That's all for now; maybe I'll lookk at it again in a week or so. Ling.Nut (talk) 13:44, 24 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • See responses to comments in article.
  • Could you point to examples of the subtle writing? It's too subtle for me to see...:)
  • I have no idea what the "high-browish" vocabulary is - I looked through the article again and again and I couldn't even find examples of what you might call SAT words. The harder words are all in the quotations - I have dumbed down my vocabulary here deliberately and I'm not really sure that I need to do so anymore. I don't think that hordes of readers are going to be reading this - those who make it to this rather obscure corner of wikipedia are going to be able to follow these words, I'm pretty sure. If they can't, they probably can't follow the ideas either.
  • I'm a conservative wikilinker - I link only high-value links.
  • I fixed the dashes - except for those in the page ranges. Someone can run a bot if they care to.
  • I've never heard the term Educational perennialism used in connection with Trimmer, unfortunately.
  • Yes - the 1790s and 1800s was a great period of instability in British history. War, near revolution, and all. I'm also working on the 1794 Treason Trials which is about the same period. :) Awadewit | talk 14:26, 24 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm an EFL teacher, at the college level... :-)
  • I felt that many of the key concepts are based in an understanding of the history of Western culture. I added several wikilinks for this reason... if there are no relevant articles to be linked to for some of the more abstract concepts, then... even a well-educated reader may confuse the terms with their modern counterparts...
  • I agree that the article assumes one has a grounding in the history of Western culture. However, I think that an article on the first journal to review children's literature in Britain can do that. The readers who will be looking at this article will more than likely have that background. If they do not, they will not understand it at all, I'm afraid. It is difficult to know what level to aim at, but as WP:BETTER#Provide context for the reader explains, we assume different readerships for different articles. For example, I would assume that the History of Britain article would not assume a familiarity with Western culture, while this article, because of its specialized nature, can. The only reason I deleted some of the wikilinks is precisely because they linked to modern explanations. :) Awadewit | talk 04:50, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Re "subtle": I have been in relationship-preventing arguments with other Wikipedia editors over extremely similar issues. I cannot seem to port the experience I have in placing myself in the shoes of readers who are impervious to the delicate wiles of advanced vocabulary (and the riches of shades of meaning they proffer) to other people. Forex, the paragraph about conspiricies: the whole mental construct hangs on the single signal word "argued," which signals to the reader that all that follows is from Trimmer's POV. But heck, maybe she was just arguing with someone, eh? She was fighting those darn liberals, wasn't she? Don't you argue when you fight? The word "intended" too takes on a new meaning if "argued" is misconstrued in that manner... uh... if you wanna get into my head, try reading "My Trouble is my English" by Danling Fu (sp.?). The editors I alluded to earlier would guffaw at these remarks; I'm hoping you won't. :-)
  • The thing is, if a reader cannot understand what "Trimmer argued" and "Trimmer intended" means, they have much more serious reading comprehension problems than we can address here. You know I teach composition at the college level - I have seen these comprehension problems. If a reader cannot grasp these basic issues, we can only do so much - I have indicated the intention and POV for every single sentence. That is actually overkill, but I was trying to be as clear as possible. I'm not really sure how you would want this to be written - too much explanation actually becomes wordy and confusing. Awadewit | talk 04:50, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the turmoil you mentioned should be mentioned in the article. this requires the addition of only one or at most two sentences.

(undent).

  • OK. :-) I guess the underlying point of some of my stuff above was simply that I think the POV-shift in the article is unnecessary... POV-shift is a literary device; I'm not sure it is the best tool for presnting information within an encyclopedia article. As for "highbrow", well, I should have known better; I should have chosen a word that doesn't have some faint negative connotations. Many of the words are very low-frequency, e.g. "praxis." Yes it's relatively more frequent in education literature (my second grad degree was in the area of education). Yes I recall that you mentioned there's some WP:MOS rule about not wikilinking within a direct quote (?). If such a rule exists, then it is a good example of a rule that deserves to be ignored. Think of it as a small but meaningful example of WP:IAR if you like. To paraphrase Mark 2:27 (you'll recall I'm teaching Bible lit ;-) ) "Wikipedia was not made for WP:MOS, but WP:MOS for Wikipedia." Reader-centered comprehensibility always trumps writer-centered rules, regardless of the latter's rationalization(s).
  • I guess I don't really see the shifts - it is all third-person reporting, if you know what I mean. The article doesn't speak in Trimmer's voice (that would be very literary).
  • "Praxis" is a more sophisticated word, but it is in a quote that I feel is necessary. I feel very uncomfortable linking words that are not proper nouns in quotations. To me it really is interpretation. I would fight such linking even without the MOS rule, as I see it as an alteration of the quotation. As a literary scholar, it makes me nervous when people start altering and interpreting quotations like that. I do ignore that rule when names and places need to be elucidated, but that is about as far as my faint heart will go. :)
  • But I'm done yammering now. I dunno if I have anything else to say... I'm absolutely certain this article will rec'v a well-deserved FA in a relatively short while. It just needs a trivial amount of shining up. :-) Later! Ling.Nut (talk) 05:55, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oh I really don't know how the FAC regulars interpret "comprehensive". To me it is comprehensive because I can't imagine any more being written about this particular topic.. plus it is extremly good even if (in my opinion...) a bit too difficult in vocab and sentence structure... but I am an utter FAC newbie.. I think my comments today on John Knox were my first ever on a FAC that was not my own. Sorry if I sounded snippy or snobbish or anything negative. My evil alternate personality emerges when I express my inner self. Cheers! Ling.Nut (talk) 12:05, 25 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

QP10qp

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An interesting article about a little-known "first" (though I can say, smugly, that as a reader of the Sarah Trimmer article, I was aware of this, thanks to the same editor). The article is cutting-edge, in its way, because it is one thing for feminist scholars to haul their spiritual ancestors into the light, but another to unearth conservative female figures and polish them up with the same loving care.

  • The article is very well written from sentence to sentence, but I think Ling Nut has a point—not so much, in my opinion, that the words are too long, or whatever, but that the prose reads a little heavily at times. In my opinion this is down to a reliance, in places, on too many sentences, one after another, of a similar length and cadence. An example would be the paragraph beginning "Late in life...", in my opinion. A short sentence or two would provide variety, I think, and renew the impetus. I know that you read articles out aloud while editing (I do too), and perhaps another run-through might throw up places where the prose could do with a little more spring in its step. (This is a downright finicky thing for me to say, I admit, but there's little in the article to criticise, so I am perhaps grasping at a straw).
  • Trimmer undertook no small task in publishing her periodical. Is the (jejune) litotes necessary? Rather a weak opening to a paragraph, possibly.
Ah, Hemingwayesque. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • As a high-church Anglican, she was intent on protecting Christianity from secularism as well as evangelicalism, particularly as it manifested itself in Methodism. Something about this somewhat over-ismed sentence leaves me unclear about what manifested itself in Methodism. I was going to copyedit to "as the latter" but could not be certain I was reading this as intended.
Fine. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • The link to Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer. I tend to add something like "Full view available at Google Books" for Google Books links like that, just to give the readers an idea of where they are going when they click.
OK. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • "I will only say, that the more I reflect on the subject, the more I am convinced that it is not right to supersede the figurative style in which they speak of God and divine things, my opinion is, that whoever attempts to teach the truths of divine revelation, should follow the method of the inspired writers as nearly as possible" I found this difficult to get my head round; who are "they"? Not one of Mrs Trimmer's most inspired sentences, I venture. You introduce this after mentioning inerrancy rather than style, so for me the context isn't self-explanatory.
  • Attempted to explain: For Trimmer, the truth of the Bible was not only in its content, but also in its style, and some of her harshest reviews were written against texts that altered both the style and the substance of the Bible. Awadewit | talk 02:28, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that brings it into context nicely. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • caretakers: Did you know that in BE this has the meaning of "janitors"? We would say "carers" here. This isn't to insist on British vocabulary, of course, but just to tell you that this is one of those transpondian oddities.
Perfect. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Other notable children's authors reviewed in the Guardian include Wollstonecraft, Sarah Fielding, and Dorothy Kilner. This seemed to me rather tacked on to the end of its paragraph.
OK. qp10qp (talk) 15:22, 7 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there you are. You are getting so good at this lark that I've had a struggle coming up with even this many nitpicks. It's neat that you've taken the trouble with this article, even though you don't intend to try for FA. The quest for quality comes through just the same, and I wouldn't have expected anything else. qp10qp (talk) 21:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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