User talk:JCalahan

Hi, J Calahan
Welcome to wiki, if you haven't been here before and welcome back if you have.

Leonardo is having a major rewrite. And I'm the major rewriter. I'm continually swapping backwards and forwards between two articles, the other being Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor.

I'm having continuous problem with my computer/keyboard which continually doubles the letters and sometimes whole words, creating nonsense, particularly if I type fast. Added to that, my PC lumbbers along, making editting a lengthy business. In correcting typos and dubbydups, I don't alwys notice the missing punc. Missng ltters are quite bad enough. If you want to chase me around a dozen articles correcting my punctuation, then be my guest. My grammar is usually excellent otherwise, so if it's very badly structured, then I probably either didn't write it, or deleted a word or two while correcting because my keyboard has this anxiety problem.

Re that section:-
 * It isn't under the heading of Leonardo's training. It's the next sub-section.
 * It's about Leonardo's contemporaries, and gives a rough guide to their comparative ages. One way of doing it would be to put in every date. This is not encouraged unless the article is about the person specifically. Verrocchio's dates might be significant to the article but not the dates for Piero, della Robbia etc etc. Its more a matter of giving a picture as to levels of relationship.

Ghirlandaio, Botticelli and Perugino were all that bit older than Leonardo. When the big commisssion came up, they got it; he didn't! But how could he keep away? There is no way that Leonardo would have kept away from the Vatican when five or six other painters were working on the Sistine Chapel, any more than Donatello or Brunellescchi could keep away from Ghiberti's doors. This is the sort of relational thing that the paragraph is indicating, which cannot be stated, because it is purely speculative. I think that Perugino's debt to Leonardo is enormous. I wonder if he would have acknowledged it.


 * Another thing that the paragrph does is indicate where to look for more information. This is why a key event in the making of Lorenzo's popularity, the Pazzi Conspiracy has been dropped in. I will puut the date of Giuliano's death. The Pazzi Conspiracy is mentioned later in the article, in the paragraph on Journals (or is it the paragraph on drawings?).


 * Brosi, who is very good at these things, will knock that paragrph into shape, using what I have written as a guide. We have a good working relationship.

Can I invite you to go over to the other page- Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor and check grammar, spelling, dubbydups etc.

NOT: It's not a good idea to edit if there is a banner displayed saying that editing is currently in progress. It causes havoc for the person who may have spent hours on the article and not saved it!

Oh, just ignore my facile comments on the Leonardo comment page.... I'll do the commas, if they haven't been done by someone else while I'm writing this.

Happy editting!

--Amandajm 10:07, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Re: Hi, J Calahan
Thanks for the detailed response--you certainly do take the job seriously, and by that I'm impressed.

I understand upon looking more closely what the intention is with the section, and I see how you took my comments re: the relevancy of the information in the "Leonardo's Florence" section. In fact, I really have little problem with the content of the section per se, but rather how its presented. It merely looks like the ultimate paragraph abt Michelangelo, Donatello et al is irrelevant because there's nothing transitioning from the main content of the section to this point, which is more like a rhetorical step back to view the period from a larger perspective. If we're not given an appropriate transition there, we're left to wonder why the writer has included the information at all. To that end, all it takes to set that up is: "Contrary to popular belief" or something that signals that the writer is taking us outside Florence and into the realm of popular opinion, or commonly held belief, or legend, or perception, or what have you.

Furthermore, you've added some appropriate commas, but it looks like you've added too many in some places. I just signed up for my account, so in a couple of days I'll have greater access privileges, at which time I can give you a hand with the style cleanup. It appears as if you're very open to assistance, so I'd like to help any way I can. I'll have a look at the "scientist and inventor" page as well.

I'm all for helping those school kids! Let's just make sure we give them well-written, error-free prose as a model so they don't start to slack in their own essays! JCalahan 22:09, 5 February 2007 (UTC)