User:Alexa Bierstock/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Organizational communication

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I understand the topic and have some existing knowledge of it. It's hard to evaluate an article without an idea of the topic and subtopics within it, so I figured this article would be a good place to start.

Evaluate the article
Good lead: gives a definition of organizational communication and outlines the general scope of the topic.

A lot of ideas in the article need more citations/references because they sound like they could be pulled from opinion. For example:

- History section of the article -> where did the ideas about Foucault and critical theory come from?

- Early underlying assumptions -> all of the bullet points need to be reinforced with proper citations.

- The Perspectives section only includes the perspective of one person.

Article organization and writing quality could be improved:

- Ideas in the History section could be more thorough for better understanding

- Some ideas in the Early underlying assumptions section should be simplified, and the organization of this section isn't great - kind of just throwing important names out there at the end of it without an order or flow to it

- The Role of organizational communication section is just a large paragraph of points that don't come together in any sort of meaningful or interpretable way

- Conflicting statements: "Humans act rationally. Sane people do not behave in rational ways"

Content could be added to represent modern viewpoints and ideas in organizational communication, especially concerning modern day tools used in organizational communication to collect data in organizations. The History section is also missing some important people in the history of organizational communication and business structure, such as Frederick Taylor, Henry Fayol, and Max Weber. There also should be more content discussing organizational hierarchies. There are is too much repeating information, especially about formal and informal/verbal and nonverbal. In other areas, it is also just too detailed for such a broad topic.

Overall, definitions are good but a lot of the article needs to be simplified, updated with modern perspectives, needs more backing (rather than just one guy's ideas), and more citations. There is also a disproportional amount of the article talking about research designs in communication rather than organizational communication itself.