User:Tktrav/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Identification in rhetoric

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I'm interested in the topic as I see numerous divisions between people in my workplace, community, and country. There is an abundance of divisive rhetoric and a dearth of rhetoric to try to unite people who have more in common than they seem to realize. Honestly, I was not familiar with this theory, and I would like to learn more about it. I wonder if more awareness of the idea could be a step toward putting uniting rhetoric into practice. My preliminary impression is that for such an exciting idea, there was relatively little information in this article.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)


 * Rated C-Class on quality scale, Low-importance on importance scale.
 * The most recent posts on the Talk page are from 2017, and these two issues were changed in 2017. (The leading sentence contained some opinion about Burke's place in the field. There was also discussion of an example that did not represent identification adequately.)
 * I'm not sure the heading "History" is the right term. This isn't a discussion of the history of the concept or how the concept expanded or has been reinterpretated over time. Perhaps this section could be Theoretical Grounding, for example, so that there could be expanded discussion of related concepts.
 * The Application section could be expanded to include business communication and political rhetoric as well as other subtopics.
 * The information in Application section is well-written and accurate (I have to assume some of this at this point as I did not fact-check everything). However, the lead and History sections feel disjointed and incomplete.
 * The article does not cite Burke directly, instead citing sources who summarize or quote Burke. There is an uncited quoted phrase, and the article is labeled "unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations" from 2015.
 * I noticed there is a separate article Identification in Burkean rhetoric, which does contain some accurate and relevant information about Burke's theory that is lacking in the current article. Its Talk page reveals it was written by a graduate student as a class assignment in 2006, but it had not been updated since then. I think the articles could be merged or at least linked.

Comments from Dr. Vetter
Nice evaluation here! This is directly in the scope of our project and would be a great choice for editing. I think you're right that the two articles "Identification in rhetoric" and "Identification in Burkean rhetoric" should be merged. There is a process for that which I could help you initiate, if you're interested in working on this one as your class project. I agree with all of your assessments. I would definitely like to see the History section renamed as Theoretical Foundations or Grounding, and the applications section updated. But if you decided to do the merge then you would want to think about how the info from both articles could best be incorporated.

Again, this would be an excellent topic to work on and I could help you with some sources should you choose to focus on this.

Best, Dr. Vetter DarthVetter (talk) 18:30, 14 February 2022 (UTC)