Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Copy-editing essentials

Wikipedia has a powerful and unique role to play in recording military history. As well as pursuing high standards of accuracy, verification and neutrality, the quality of prose and formatting of our military history articles should aim to be of a professional standard. Good prose is important to maintaining and increasing the authority and reputation of Wikipedia's military history articles and their contribution to our understanding of history in a broader sense.

On the personal level, many topics involve the ultimate sacrifice by people whose memory is still very much alive, and we need to do justice to this memory in article prose.

The writing in MilHist articles does not need to be beautiful; the challenge is, rather, that it be engaging as well as plain and easy to read. Here are general tips on what to aim for in copy-editing MilHist articles.

Organisational tips

The letter home: a British soldier writing in a loft over a cow-shed "somewhere near the front", 30 December 1914

Teamwork is usually essential to producing fine MilHist articles. Unless you have a lot of experience and the right range of skills, you'll need to be a team player − knowing your strengths and weaknesses and matching them with those of others.

Try to network with the membership of WikiProject MilHist, whose areas of expertise are included in the membership list. There are three important factors in how you prioritise your social and professional networking with other MilHist editors:

1. What MilHist topics are they interested in?
2. What skills do they have? (There are many possibilities, including copy-editing, researching secondary sources and verification, broad historical contexts, military strategy, image management, and military engineering, geography, aviation, and technology.)
3. How amenable are they to collaborating with you on your chosen topics?

Building fresh collaborations or finding your way into an existing network of editors is very much a social experience. The benefits need to be reciprocal (at least over time), and are partly based on whether people like interacting with you and partly on the fit of your skills and knowledge with theirs. It should be an enjoyable experience.

You may also have opportunities to attract non-member Wikipedians (and even people who are not yet Wikipedians) into MilHist, to work on a single project or on a longer-term basis. Naturally, this is strongly encouraged by the WikiProject.

Copy editors are in short supply at Wikipedia, so if copy-editing is not your strength you'll need to do two things:

1. Locate those who are good at it; more information on how to do this can be found here.
2. Be prepared to do basic copy-editing beforehand.

Often, copy-editors and those with substantive knowledge of the topic and its sources will need to interact to produce a professional article. This can be done on the article's talk page and in invisible comments to other editors, which can be inserted into the body of the article text. Take care to use the latter method judiciously, without accidentally changing the appearance of the text.

Ways to improve your copy-editing

Style guides

• Be familiar with the MilHist style guide.
• Probably the best place to start after this is a recently-introduced concise version of the Manual of Style (main page): only 40% of the size, its scope is nearly identical.
• Ease yourself into, at least, a passing knowledge of the main Wikipedia style guides:
  • the Manual of Style (main page);
  • MOSNUM (for specialist advice on numbers and dates, probably necessary only for more technological and technical MilHist topics); and
  • WP:MOSLINK, for advice on wikilinking and external linking.

These pages have detailed information. English is that kind of language—big and baggy and needing lots of reining in. Don't be daunted by their size; they are there to assist you, and gradually you'll become familiar with the issues and know where to access them quickly and easily if you need to.

Observe the FAC, FLC and GA processes

It can be instructive to see what reviewers say about the prose of MilHist nominations and to observe the diffs of nominations as they improve in this respect. At FAC, there has been steady improvement in the quality of MilHist prose.

Strategic distance

Strategic distance is an important tool for getting the most out of your writing and editing. Ironically, being too close to the text you're working on can be a disadvantage. There are several ways of temporarily distancing yourself from it, including the following:

• Regularly press the "Show preview" button to peruse the text in a different visual display from that of the edit window.
• Print out the text and mark it up with a pen, preferably in a different environment from where you normally edit (cafes are good for that).
• Take a break, and come back refreshed.
• Get someone else to go through it.
• Read it in reverse, section-by-section or even sentence-by-sentence.
• Read it aloud.

In terms of organisation, it is often helpful to copy-edit more than one article or section at a time and to alternate between them to freshen your mind. No two copy-edits are exactly alike.

Language tips

Generally write for non-experts

Aim to bring all readers into your topic. It's easy to assume expert or semi-expert knowledge when you're close to a topic; try to read it as though you're an interested, intelligent non-expert. There may be occasional exceptions; when a topic or section is highly technical (such as on military equipment and technology, weapons, armour, and vehicles), it may be appropriate to pitch the material at readers with specialised knowledge. Even so, try to speak to as wide a readership as possible through the judicious use of focused wikilinking and brief definitions using parentheses, dashes or commas; you'll know you're trying too hard to explain things if the text becomes cluttered. Editorial judgement and feedback from your collaborators is important in this respect.

Plain English

Our language is one of the few in which elegance and plainness are intertwined.

Simple vocabulary. Choose basic rather than elaborate words (the battle started, not the battle commenced; the landing was completed in an hour, not within an hour—unless you want to imply that an hour was some kind of deadline). There are more suggestions for plain word choice here.

Simple grammar. Like vocabulary, simple grammatical structures are preferred. Here's an example:

How you can make this sentence crisper?

It was decided by Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, that another raid on the English coast was to be carried out.

It's indirect, over-elaborate and wordy.

Hint

The problem lies in the unnecessary passive voice ("was decided by" and again, "to be carried out"); this can be a turn-off for readers. Use active voice and you can place the important bits earlier.

Solution

Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, decided to carry out another raid on the English coast.

Or "had decided", depending on the context.

Long snakes. Avoid long, winding sentences; they're too taxing on your readers' working memory. They can typically be divided with a semicolon or period:

Where can you split this snake?

Derfflinger was part of the First Scouting Group for most of World War I, and was involved in several fleet actions during the war, taking part in the bombardments of English coastal towns, as well as the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland, where her stubborn resistance led to the British nicknaming her "Iron Dog".

Split here?

Derfflinger was part of the First Scouting Group for most of World War I, and was involved in several fleet actions during the war, taking part in the bombardments of English coastal towns, as well as the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland, where her stubborn resistance led to the British nicknaming her "Iron Dog".

But how will you make the split?

Solution

Derfflinger was part of the First Scouting Group for most of World War I, and was involved in several fleet actions during the war. She took part in the bombardments of English coastal towns, as well as the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland, where her stubborn resistance led to the British nicknaming her "Iron Dog".

Similarly, long paragraphs are daunting to readers. Identify where you might break them to allow readers to "start afresh" and download the previous information, as it were, into their long-term memory.

Redundancy

Redundancy, rather than poor grammar and spelling, is the biggest source of problems in prose. A smooth read requires no wasted words; it's as simple as that. All good writing is lean. It's an acquired skill—an attitude that, with practice, you can switch on easily. Here's an example:

Identify two redundant words.

A copy of The Times informed von Reuter that the Armistice was to expire at noon on 21 June 1919, which was the deadline by which Germany was to have signed the peace treaty.

Hint

Removing one of the two words will solve a repetition problem too.

Solution

A copy of The Times informed von Reuter that the Armistice was to expire at noon on 21 June 1919, which was the deadline by which Germany was to have signed the peace treaty.

But wait: there's more you can do. After the comma, there are two more bad patches. In total, five words could be replaced by just two.

Where to look for savings

A copy of The Times informed von Reuter that the Armistice was to expire at noon on 21 June 1919, the deadline by which Germany was to have signed the peace treaty.

Even better?

A copy of The Times informed von Reuter that the Armistice was to expire at noon on 21 June 1919, the deadline for Germany to sign the peace treaty.

Consider trying out your skills on more "weeding" exercises here.

Precision

Be precise wherever possible. The campaign involved the capture of Japanese bases in the Admiralty Islands. If it's not mentioned elsewhere in the article, ask the content writers how many bases there were; it could be interesting: The campaign involved the capture of the three Japanese bases in the Admiralty Islands (a fourth had been abandoned by the Japanese in February 1943).

Unnecessary sequence words

A lot of MilHist involves storytelling. Stories are strings of actions and facts; once the reader knows it's a narrative description of a battle or the development of a new military helicopter technology, you can usually strengthen the flow by removing such sequence words as "then", "in addition", "also", "next", and "after this".

Repetition

English is more particular than most languages about the close repetition of words. By this, we don't mean common grammatical words—such as "the" and "to"—but lexical items. The less-frequently-used a word normally is, the more a reader will notice its repetition.

Problem text: identify the repeated word.

The plan involved two simultaneous attacks by light cruisers and destroyers, one on Flanders and another on shipping in the Thames estuary; Hindenburg and the other four battlecruisers were to support the Thames attack. After both attacks, the fleet was to concentrate off the Dutch coast, where it would meet the Grand Fleet in battle.

Hint: identify a simple substitution of one of the underlined words.

The plan involved two simultaneous attacks by light cruisers and destroyers, one on Flanders and another on shipping in the Thames estuary; Hindenburg and the other four battlecruisers were to support the latter attack. After both attacks, the fleet was to concentrate off the Dutch coast, where it would meet the Grand Fleet in battle.

A solution

The plan involved two simultaneous attacks by light cruisers and destroyers, one on Flanders and another on shipping in the Thames estuary; Hindenburg and the other four battlecruisers were to support the latter Thames attack. After both strikes, the fleet was to concentrate off the Dutch coast, where it would meet the Grand Fleet in battle.

Comments

• Three occurrences of "attack(s)" were too many in this short space.
• In addition, we thought "latter attack" was pretty ugly, and substituted a more direct back-reference.

However, repetition isn't quite as simple as this. There's bad repetition (like what we've just seen) and good repetition. Explicitly "back-referring" to an important word by repeating it can make the text more cohesive and avoid ambiguity.

Where would repeating a word be more precise?

As part of Operation Perch, a manoeuvre intended to encircle and capture the German-occupied city of Caen, the British 7th Armoured Division made an opportunistic attempt to drive into the German flank through a gap in the front line and to seize the town of Villers-Bocage. Although the troops were hampered by rain and strong winds and eventually withdrew, they managed to cause considerable disruption.

Solution

As part of Operation Perch, a manoeuvre intended to encircle and capture the German-occupied city of Caen, the British 7th Armoured Division made an opportunistic attempt to drive into the German flank through a gap in the front line and to seize the town of Villers-Bocage. Although the troops were the Division was hampered by rain and strong winds and eventually withdrew ...

Repeating "Division" makes it clear.

Consistency

Inconsistency in naming and formatting within an article makes the text more difficult to understand. Sifting through an article, using your memory of what has come before to pick up glitches, is a good exercise for editors who are relatively inexperienced at copy-editing. Here are a few examples of common inconsistencies in the same article:

• A spaced en dash – like this – and then an unspaced em dash—like this—in an article
• 6 January and then February 14
• Major-General and later Major General
• 1st Infantry Division and then First Infantry Division

The straight line

Make the flow of consciousness simple. Often, MilHist articles need to describe a long, complex series of events; it can be hard to present such a narrative logically to readers, especially when you know the story well yourself. Here's an example from the lead of the otherwise-good article, Admiralty Islands campaign, summarising its dramatic events. Remember that non-expert readers know nothing yet—this is their first taste of the dramatic scenario. Make a mental note of the queries many readers would have in the second paragraph. Don't expect them to divert to the links right now.

Problem text: read this carefully, think about it, then proceed.

The Admiralty Islands campaign (Operation Brewer) was a series of battles in the New Guinea campaign of World War II in which the United States 1st Cavalry Division assaulted Japanese bases in the Admiralty Islands.

Acting on reports from airmen that there were no signs of enemy activity and that the islands may have been evacuated, General Douglas MacArthur accelerated his timetable and ordered a reconnaissance in force of the islands. The campaign started on 29 February 1944 when a small force was landed on a beach on Los Negros Island. By landing on a small beach where the Japanese did not anticipate a landing attempt, the force achieved tactical surprise, but the islands proved to be far from unoccupied. A furious battle developed for control of the Admiralty Islands that was fought out on the islands, in the surrounding waters, and in the air above.

Where will readers get confused or feel there's a gap?

Here's the second paragraph alone.

Acting on reports from airmen that there were no signs of enemy activity and that the islands may have been evacuated, General Douglas MacArthur accelerated his timetable [what timetable?] and ordered a reconnaissance in force [what's that?]. The campaign started on 29 February 1944 when a small force was landed on a beach on Los Negros Island [I guess that's one of the Admiralty Islands]. By landing on a small beach where the Japanese did not anticipate a landing attempt, [err ... I thought they expected to find no Japanese] the force achieved tactical surprise, but the islands proved to be far from unoccupied. A furious battle ensued for the control of the Admiralty Islands that was fought out on the islands, [Islands ... islands? Ah, read on.] in the surrounding waters and in the air.

Possible solution

Here's one possible solution, with additions underlined:

Acting on reports from airmen that there were no signs of enemy activity and that the islands may have been evacuated, General Douglas MacArthur accelerated his timetable for the Operation and ordered a reconnaissance in force. This limited offensive to gauge the enemy's reaction started on 29 February 1944 when a small force landed on a secluded beach on Los Negros Island, one of the three main islands in the group. Despite this tactical surprise, it soon became evident that the islands had not been evacuated at all, and the Division was immediately forced into a furious land, sea and air battle to win control.

Explanations

Now the sequence of events is clearer, and it turns out that knowing what "reconnaissance in force" means, here and now, is essential. There's no confusion between that and the full campaign; instead, the readers get a feeling for how a nasty surprise must have rolled all too quickly into a full-blown operation. Now the reader is excited, not confused and working hard.

Other resources

• Beginners' guide to the Manual of Style
• General advice on how to improve your prose
• User:AndyZ/Suggestions
• User:Epbr123#Style_and_prose_checklist
• Advanced editing exercises
• Build your linking skills
• Using hyphens and dashes
• Exercises in avoiding the "noun plus -ing" construction
• Exercises in paragraphing and sentence structure