User:JuliaLeary/Home sign/GiannaParisi Peer Review

Peer review
This is where you will complete your peer review exercise. Please use the following template to fill out your review.

General info

 * Whose work are you reviewing? JuliaLeary & Rebscar
 * Link to draft you're reviewing: User:JuliaLeary/Home sign

Lead evaluation
I can definitely see where you updated the original article in your lead. The introductory sentence is strong, and effectively summarizes what a Home Sign is. The lead is very concise, and gives me a good sense of what Home signs are without having to read through the whole article, with a sentence used to represent each section.

Content evaluation
You guys definitely expanded on the information in the original article in a way that gives me a better idea on what home signs are! Judging from your references, the content seems to range in publishing dates, which gives me a better idea on different studies and how the understanding of Home Sign has evolved with time. I do wish you provided more examples of actually home signs in the first section of your article though (maybe where you discussed morphology, syntax, etc). It would really give the public a better idea of what homes signs look like and how they differ from a standard signed language system if examples of common home signs were provided.

Tone and balance evaluation
Your tone is very neutral throughout this article. You stay very formal and professional in your description of home signs, and accurately present findings that give a better understanding of the system without being biased towards a singular view on home signs. One thing I would recommend, however, is that you make the tone of your article more accessible to the common reader. As someone who does not major in linguistics, and who has not really looked into home signs in great detail throughout my time as a Deaf studies student, I found that some of the jargon used in the article went over my head. It would definitely be useful to just go through and explain some of the information in the "Identifying Features" section (especially everything before the Morphology section) to make it a bit more accessible to individuals who are just beginning to learn more about different aspects of sign language linguistics.

Sources and references evaluation
You have an abundance of sources throughout your article, the links all work, and everything reference seems to be legitimate and peer reviewed. I have no comments to give on your sources and references, because all are extremely useful and good to cite in the context of your article.

Organization evaluation
The content is very well organized, with a lot of headers and subheaders that efficiently break everything down so that if I wanted to learn about one aspect of home signs, I could easily find it. The only complaint I have, once again, is that you make the parts mentioned in the Tone and Balance section of this peer review a BIT easier to read (nothing crazy, but just describe more of the features of home sign used that you have not already linked or provided definitions of). I didn't see any grammatical or spelling errors (but then again I'm really horrible at finding them).

Images and media evaluation
Your article could benefit from some images (though I know it's really hard to find images that aren't copyrighted). Maybe having visual references for examples of home signs would give a better understanding, but then again, I don't think images are THAT necessary in this article.

Overall impressions
Guiding questions:


 * Has the content added improved the overall quality of the article - i.e. Is the article more complete?
 * What are the strengths of the content added?
 * How can the content added be improved?

Overall evaluation
This article is DEFINITELY more complete than it was before you edited it! The content you added was definitely needed -- I particularly thought the first section where you described home sign structure a bit more was a good add-on, as well as the additional studies you inputted at the end. Look towards the content section of this peer review to see how the content can potentially be improved a little bit. Really good article though!