User:Trent 900

So, this is a wikipedia user page, huh?

If anyone should get here by accident and wonder why I'm called Trent 900, my name isn't Trent, I'm rather geekily named after the largest in the Trent family of Rolls-Royce jet turbine engines. I work for Rolls-Royce, you see. And no, they don't give you company cars, more's the pity, the car business was sold to BMW...

I've just graduated from Oxford University, UK in Materials Science, which explains why the articles I write and edit have a strong tendency to be physical science related.

I'm not much of a computer person and I don't know HTML so page writing is something of a challenge for me but I'd like to make it a project of mine to update and flesh out the pages on materials science related issues. Plus whatever else is absent that comes to mind! So far I've written pages on Freeze casting, Spray forming and Characterization and helped edit the main Materials science page.

Any tips, tricks, comments, criticisms gratefully appreciated.

About me: I'm 22, male, British, and am leaving Uni for the big wide world. I enjoy mountain biking, road cycling, watching TV, steaks, cake, reading, and playing with my band.

My strengths (I think)

 * Copy editing. My spelling and grammar are pretty much error-free and I have a natural ability to make a sentence clear and meaningful. I can also normally find the meaning in really bad copy (you know, the totally god-awful stuff you're sometimes privileged to find) and bring it out by rewrite if necessary.
 * NPOV. I'm pretty good at keeping POV out of what I write, without sacrificing interest, which is an issue in a few articles.

My weaknesses (I know)

 * Waffle. I've always had something of a tendency to deviate, stray into areas I think are interesting but are perhaps a tad irrelevant, and be verbose. However, at university I've learned to keep this mostly in check.
 * Tenacity. I'm no archivist. Faced with the task of compiling a reference list and using it properly I often lose heart and drift away, which is why the godlike article I'm trying to write on Spray forming is, errr, in progress. Rather like Wembley stadium. Strangely I don't have this problem when faced with even the toughest problems in copy editing.

My pet peeves

 * Filthy, unclean, unholy redlinks all over an article. Redlink something if you must, if you really think it needs a page but please either request it or give it a stub. Also, when redlinking, please pipe the redlink to a decent title for the intended page, otherwise the title ends up being the form of words you used in your article, which is often a bit dodgy.
 * (Rampant parantheses and subordinate clauses). Actually in a way I love these because they give me a chance to do some really vicious copy editing which I kind of enjoy, but seriously, brackets and commas are dangerous tools. Rule of thumb 1: don't use brackets. Ever. There's always a better way. Rule of thumb 2: if you've got more than 2 subordinate clauses in a sentence, or even worse if you've got more than 2 bracketed or hyphenated sections, it's probably getting unreadable and you want to think about splitting the sentence up. Even at 2 you might want to just check it's nice and readable. Rule of thumb 3: Semicolons are your friends!!! I personally have a deep love for the semicolon as it puts a nice big break in a long complex sentence while retaining the erudite tone that a long sentence gives.
 * Silly errors. Spelling. How hard is it to spellcheck an article? Inconsistencies of number and tense, such as writing parts of a historical article in the present tense, 'historical drama style'. OK it works fine on TV but not so well written down. Apostrophes, especially in 'it's'. It's means it is not belonging to it. That's an understandable mistake however, especially from people who don't make the other one: apostrophes usually indicate possession, never plurality. Finally, usage of the wrong homophone. The best example of this is there, they're and their.