User talk:DmccarthyUMASS/sandbox

Some notes
I hope you don't mind, but I had some notes for you:

Be careful of tone. In the section "early life" you wrote the phrase "Dix found her passion in writing and story telling at an early age". The problem with this is that the phrase "found her passion" is considered to be relatively promotional in tone and is something you typically find in PR marketing material. It'd be better to rephrase this to something a little less loaded, like "Dix showed interest in writing and story telling at an early age". While I'll admit that it doesn't sound as cool as "found her passion", it won't set off WP:NPOV concerns and will accomplish the same end. This sentence is more problematic: "This ultimately marked the end of Beulah Marie Dix career, her passion and work ethic towards screenwriting was unparalleled during this era which allowed her to leave her mark on the silent film era." The problem with this sentence is that this comes across as a personal opinion or original research, which shouldn't be on Wikipedia.

Avoid using Dix's first name in the article. This can come across as too casual for an encyclopedia and can sometimes be considered promotional since a lot of marketing material will tend to use a subject's first name rather than their last name. Another reason is that the basic standard on Wikipedia is to use the last name.

I also need to warn you that you'll need to source everything in the article. You don't need a source behind every line, but you will need things to back up the claims in the early life and career section, especially the claims as to why she was let go from Paramount. A lack of sourcing can make people contest a claim and even remove it from an article, especially if they believe that it isn't neutrally written or might be original research. As much as I hate to say this, a lot of people will just remove something from an article rather than fix and improve it, since it's (seemingly) easier to delete something than to fix it. I'm not as worried about the sourcing though, since you're still working on this and you might not have added the sourcing yet.

The thing to keep in mind when writing an encyclopedia article is that they aren't the same thing as writing a student paper. You can insert things like this in a personal research paper, but writing an encyclopedia article is different because it has to sound neutral. I don't think that this is explicitly stated anywhere on Wikipedia, but this is a very common issue and one that pretty much all of us have done at some point in time. The overall article is well written, it just needs some tweaks for tone/style and to have more sourcing to back up the article's claims. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡)  09:12, 30 October 2015 (UTC)