User:Nomader/Improvements

Below are comments from Spirit of Eagle, originally listed here: User:Spirit of Eagle/Review of "Mississippi's 4th congressional district special election, 1981"

The article is now much more representative of the relevant literature, and gives due focus on the importance of race. While there are many issues remaining, you've addressed the most substantial ones.

For this review, I've divided up my feedback into general issues, content (areas where I think more information is needed, or that the information should be presented differently), and wording (easily corrected stylistic issues).

Current Status

 * I've addressed all comments here except the lead, will continue to try and add here.

General issues

 * The lead does a poor job summarizing the overarching article. Check out some of the featured articles at Featured articles for a good overview of election article leads.
 * I added the Almanac of America politics to the "source" list. The book is currently cited in citation 32. The citation does not link back to the source list, so you'll need to add the relevant coding. (I'd do this myself, but I'm unfamiliar with the coding and don't want to gunk up your article).

Content

 * "Even though a sizable majority of the electorate opposed Hinson, the Democratic nominee Britt Singletary and Leslie B. McLemore, an African-American independent, evenly split the remaining vote between them and allowed Hinson to win"
 * According to United States House of Representatives elections, 1978, Hinson won an outright majority of the vote in 1978, meaning 1980 a major decline in his political support. Unfortunately, there is not a single source anywhere in that article. I'd look for a source comparing Hinson's 1978 and 1980 performance. If Hinson's loss of support was explicitly connected to the controversy over his sexuality, then it should be mentioned in the article.


 * In the second to last paragraph of the "Background" section, you give a brief overview of the Democratic and Republican nominating process for the 1981 special election. This is redundant with information in the "General Election" section. I'd delete the information on the party nominating sessions from the section, and move the sentence "After Hinson's resignation, the election was scheduled for June 23, 1981" from the beginning of the "General Election" section to the very end of the second to last paragraph of the "Background" section.
 * For the ""After Hinson's resignation, the election was scheduled for June 23, 1981", I'd note that the governor is the one to call the special election.


 * "The Democrats did not endorse a particular candidate in the first round"
 * Note that the Democratic Executive Committee explicitly voted against having a nomination committee; the article makes it sound like the Democrats just never got around to nominating a candidate. You may also want to note that the state Democratic Chairman denounced the GOP for hand-picking a candidate and denying voters the right to participate in the electoral process. (If you do include this language, don't present it as the factual reason for the Democrats' decision. The party almost certainly had strategic reasons for its decisions, so their appeal to the grand principle of Jeffersonian democracy should be taken with a grain of salt).


 * "The extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became a contentious issue in the campaign leading into the runoff, and was one of the main reasons why Dowdy made it through the first round. Where Singletary had focused extensively on tying Hinson's scandals to Williams, Dowdy was the only major candidate from either party to support the Act's extention.
 * The bolded language would more be more appropriate in the "results" subsection of the "First round" section, specifically the part where you talk about Dowdy winning by appealing to black voters. Also, you misspelled the word "extension". I've italicized the location of the misspelling.


 * "The two eventually agreed to a televised debate on WAPT."
 * Were you able to find any sources describing the actual debate? It doesn't seem like the debate had much of an impact, but I would really like to see a few sentences describing it.


 * "Williams did not concede defeat on Election night. He conceded defeat the next afternoon at a press conference"
 * Source 49 notes that Williams was initially advised not to concede by GOP leaders until the votes could be checked with arithmetic accuracy, and that Williams conceded at 2 PM on Wednesday once this arithmetically accurate count occurred. I would add in this language, since it explains why Williams delayed his concession.

Wording issues

 * "Robert Weems ran for the Republican nomination with the campaign slogan of "Vote Right, Vote White, Vote Weems", and was kicked out of his leadership position with the Ku Klux Klan after going to a Jackson house party attended by neo-Nazis."
 * Break this up into two sentences.


 * "President Reagan made a phone call that was piped through to a Republican rally, where he told Williams to a cheering crowd of people, "We're waiting for you up here and need your help.""
 * The bolded language reads awkwardly. You could clean it up by making "President Reagan made a phone call that was piped through to a Republican rally" a single sentence, and re-arranging the remaining language to read "Addressing a cheering crowd, Reagan told Williams "We're waiting for you up here and need your help".


 * "...although Dowdy throughout the campaign worked to avoid criticizing Reagan himself"
 * This would be cleaner if it read "although Dowdy avoided directly criticizing Reagan himself throughout the campaign".


 * "Dowdy instead focused on local issues throughout his campaign and couched criticism of Reagan through that lens"
 * The above sentence would read better if the bolded word was added in, and the crossed out words were removed.


 * "Medgar Evers's niece cut a radio ad for Dowdy targeting African American voters and invoking Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy to support Dowdy."
 * Change "invoking" to "invoked".


 * "Voters were generally not asked for their social security number, although some voters in Hinds County were still asked for them."
 * Make this a new paragraph; it doesn't really fit in with the language on Williams' concession.

Additional newspaper sources

 * 
 * (pulling TV ad to save money)
 * 
 * (looks like it's another call for public debates-- not sure if the debate ever happened? All I can find is that an agreement was made to hold it, zero coverage of the actual debate itself)
 * Nuclear power issue, also Tip O'Neill