Talk:Brynhild Olivier/GA2

GA Review
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Reviewer: Drmies (talk · contribs) 03:10, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

I am sorry...
...but I am going to fail this, and suggest that it not be resubmitted until a very thorough rewrite has taken place. In essence, I agree with the previous reviewer (User:Caeciliusinhorto, who did a much more thorough job and looked at many more details than I did), who said "There's a lot of unnecessary detail of stuff which isn't relevant to Bryn's life at all, or only tangentially so." I wholeheartedly agree with that, but where Caeciliusinhorto, like a dutiful reviewer likely expecting to pass the article, focused on particulars and particular sentences, I find this true of the article as a whole, in content and in structure. Bear with me:

The opening sentence is already puzzling--her very first thing is being someone’s daughter, and in the next thing she’s one of four siblings; it is not easy to see what she herself is notable for. “Raised and home schooled in Jamaica and Limpsfield” is odd as well--the places are named out of order, and she was 20 when she moved to Jamaica, begging the question of how much she still needed to be raised and home schooled. (Jamaica comes unexpected/unannounced in the lead, and I found myself wondering whether there was a Jamaica in England.) The article itself reflects the problems with the opening sentence: there is SO MUCH about everyone else, and so little about her. Listing the aunts and uncles is really too much, as is this extensive listing of family friends in the Education section.

Examples of the secondary placement of the subject in much of the writing is provided by a number of topic sentences:

“Another one of Brooke's circle, Godwin Baynes, a medical student at King's and a rowing blue, was also present. The attraction that Bryn felt for Baynes was described in Brooke's poem Jealousy[52] but when Baynes proposed shortly afterwards, she refused him”--this article is about Bryn, and this, the opening sentence of a paragraph, should this have Bryn front and center, but she is buried in a subordinate clause in the second sentence. It’s similar with a later paragraph opener: “In 1912, Brooke was recovering from a mental breakdown following his realisation that Ka Cox's interests might lie elsewhere. He was despairing of Noël, was feeling suicidal and started to again consider Bryn as his primary love interest.” The subject of the article is in a subclause, the third of a list of three verb phrases, of the second sentence of the paragraph.

The prose, or prolixity, was noted by the earlier reviewer as well. Reading through the entire article I find myself wondering often what garden path I am on, and why--there is just so much non-essential detail in there. And sometimes the writing is misleading: "Despite Bryn's best efforts, Margery soon transferred her fixation to Raymond Sherrard, and she asked him to stay away,[89] but this did not last long, and soon she started an affair with him". The best antecedent for "she" is "Margery", though I don't know why she would ask him to stay away, and what to stay away from--but a few sentences later I discover that it was Bryn who has having the affair with Sherrard, not Margery.

In addition, I stumbled over comma usage. I find many infelicitous commas throughout--“ His sisters included the author, Edith Olivie”, “This group included the author, Edith Nesbit, the Webbs and the Shaws”, “the progressive coeducational boarding school, Bedales”, “Among other early childhood influences, were G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells”. One might could say that this is just usage, but it's not usage that I am familiar with or find easy to read. In addition, and this is not just usage, there’s a comma missing in “One of Margaret Cox's brothers was Harold Cox the Liberal Member of Parliament”, and in “’ One woman, hired as a nursemaid to care for the children in 1892 was the future author Gertrude Dix”. And in “By 1910, Bryn, now twenty-three realised she had…”--and that last one was already noted by the previous reviewer. That a grammar check didn't pick up on it doesn't mean much.

And this may just be a coincidence, but skimming over the rest of the article and coming across one of those editorial comments ("see image"), in “as illustrated by Gwen Raverat in her Bathers (see image)”, I found that the link was dead. The next "see image" isn't linked to anything at all, and that it points to the picture in the margin, I had to look twice for that. A few paragraphs down the same kind of pointer is phrased as "see illustration". All these inconsistencies are not helpful.

In summary, I find that this rather extensive article does not exemplify the quality of writing we would expect in a GA. It underplays the subject rhetorically, and overwhelms the topic with extraneous detail. I am truly sorry, since I can tell that a lot of time went into this. Drmies (talk) 03:10, 31 March 2020 (UTC)