User:ImGemstone/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
English studies

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I am studying English at the university level. The article appears brief yet informative.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The first sentence and first paragraph give a well-understood summary about the topic. The section as a whole provides quick snapshots into what content is covered by the proceeding sections. The second paragraph informs readers about an distinct divide in the English disciples; however, this information is not covered further in any subsequent sections.

Content

The section called "English Major" has several subsections. This section is well-balanced, portioning the appropriate amount of information for each subsection. Compared to the other two sections, this section contains a greater amount of information. To remedy this, the "English major" section could have been divided into sections rather than subsections. The "History" subsection needs additional content addressing the article topic according to the 21st century.

Tone and Balance

The article appears neutral in tone, but the word "important" is used several times, which creates a slight bias. The "Fields" section mentions English fields that pertain to literature from underrepresented groups; however, the rest of the article denotes little to no further space on these groups and their contributions to the topic. The lead section mentioned English studies as it occurs in English-speaking countries other than the United States, but in the "In High School" section, only two of those countries are described by their use of English studies.

Sources and References

Several citations are needed throughout the article, some of which are referenced in the bibliography but not as an in-text citation. This issue has already been officially flagged. At least one citation (listed as number 8) does not have an active link, which undermines its reliability. Two citations (11 and 12) are from the official government websites of Canada, which lends credibility despite not being sourced from scholarly articles. The other citations (1-7, 9-10) are from reliable, peer-reviewed articles from reputation scholarly journals or university presses. The article provides numerous hyperlinks for additional information on other Wikipedia articles. The article does not include many in-text citations throughout the article, where there should be.

Organization and Writing Quality

The article has few if any grammatical errors. The "English Major" section could be divided further from subsections into main sections in order to maintain balance; there are only two other, much smaller sections. Summaries are concise, and sentences are easily understood.

Images and Media

There are no images or media included.

Talk Pages

According to the talk page, this article was formally called "English Major", which explains the unequal distribution of information. As some editors pointed out, unbalance of information and citational issues needs a lot of work. It may even require a gutting and entire reworking of the article. It belongs to three WikiProjects pages. Some have reported the article to be biased against the functionality of an English degree, and this still needs some improvement to maintain article neutrality. As a result of the bias, a thread of questions about this functionality distracted from actual talk about editing the article.

Overall

The article is brief yet informative, which makes it good at a starting point for anyone interested in this topic or related topics. The structure could be reorganized for a more balanced read. There is enough information on the history of the topic during the 19th century, but information about the 20th and 21st centuries are lacking. Citations need work. Discussions about minority group contributions are also lacking.