Talk:The IHOP Papers

GA nomination
I have nominated this article for Good Article status.-- 十  八  11:32, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Failure
This article feels more like a start to me than a B-class. I am failing it for two things: not comprehensive enough and prose problems:

Insufficiently comprehensive
Yes, I know it's just been published within the last six months (which should have been a reason to wait on the GA nom). But even still, we could expect more than a cursory plot summary, the last graf of which trails off and tells about the book's narrative techniques and doesn't tell us how the story ends (I know we usually have a problem with plot summaries being too long, but this is a rare case where it goes the other way. You have 800 words you can use; use 'em). I also expect a reception section that does more than quote at length from reviews and uses the Amazon page on the book as a source ... not good enough, get dates on the original articles.

I'd like to know if there's a discussion of film rights. Has the author been interviewed or discussed the book publicly? What, if anything, does she say about what she was trying to do?

Prose problems
Just taking apart the lede graf, here's what we have:


 * The IHOP Papers is the debut novel of American author Ali Liebegott first published on December 13, 2006 by Carroll & Graf Publishers.

Needs a comma in there (after the author's name), and could possibly be broken up into two sentences. "First" is also redundant at this point ... I doubt another publisher will be bringing it out for a while.


 * The story revolves around a twenty-year-old lesbian named Francesca who falls in love with her female philosophy professor from her junior-college and ends up moving to San Francisco, California to be with her.

Run-on sentence, or at least too wordy. Applying William Strunk's famous "omit needless words" dictum, as quoted in E.B. White's The Elements of Style, as well as WP:MoS, I can shorten it to: "It is the story of Francesca, a 20–year-old lesbian who moves to San Francisco to be with her former professor."


 * A common theme throughout the novel are the many lesbian relationships Francesca finds herself in after she moves to San Franciso and how difficult it can be to be in love with someone.

Now that's definitely a run-on sentence. So run-on that the writer got confused as to what the subject of the verb was, and used the wrong number — "are" should be "is". The first part of the predicate is not a "theme": relationships are things that happen, not themes. The difficulty of being in love with someone is a theme ... but that should be cited somewhere; otherwise it's original research (which happens a lot in novel articles, believe me).


 * The title of the book alludes to the fact that Francesca gets a job at IHOP after her move.

English teachers today overteach the concept of allusion — "refer" would do just as nicely in this context. In any event, this should be in a separate section per WP:NOVEL guidelines.

There are a number of typoes and other lapses in the formality of the writing through the rest of the article, enough to disqualify this. A decent spell-check will catch at least a few.

The descriptions of the major characters are also too long. A few sentences are fine; we don't need three paragraphs.

Also, it is bad form to introduce IHOP without spelling it out on first reference.

Obviously, if these problems get fixed it can be renominated. But I would wait until there's some time to gain perspective, to find other reviews and an author interview, and do some rewriting. Daniel Case 03:41, 17 May 2007 (UTC)