User talk:Nicpohop

Welcome!
Hello, Nicpohop, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Blythwood (talk) 22:22, 22 April 2017 (UTC)

Welcome
Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:01, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Mutu
Hi! I'm one of the content editors with WikiEd and I wanted to give you a little feedback on your sandbox draft. Here are my notes:

You did well with the sourcing you chose, as academic sources and major art magazines like BOMB are some of the best ones you can get for an article. These normally go through some fairly rigorous editorial oversight, so you can trust what is written in them.

When writing, keep in mind that you're writing for a very general audience. This means that the article will definitely be read by people who are unfamiliar with art criticism and the way it's written, so you need to try to keep things fairly straight forward and clearly written. You have a very poetic touch and your writing style is lovely (you definitely would make an excellent art writer!), but it would unfortunately be a little hard to understand by someone who isn't as familiar with the lingo.

Finally, be careful about inserting original research in your draft. The term itself refers to times where a person reads a source and makes their own conclusion based upon what they read, even if this was not explicitly stated in the work itself or the editor phrases things in a way that makes it appear that they are writing based upon their own personal impressions. Your sandbox comes across as a bit of a personal reflection on Mutu's work, so be cautious of this. You look to have drawn your impressions from the sourcing, so what you will need to do is just tweak the writing slightly to show that the claim came from the source. Here's an example of a sentence that could be construed as original research-ish in the draft and how it could be rephrased to show that you're taking it from the source:


 * "Her use of "grotesque" textures in her work, is something that is recurring and seems to be inspired by pictures of tropical diseases she had seen as a child."
 * "Mutu frequently uses "grotesque" textures in her artwork and has cited her mother's medical books on tropical diseases as an inspiration, stating that there is "nothing more insanely visually interesting and repulsive than a body infected with tropical disease; these are diseases that grow and fester and become larger than the being that they have infected, almost."

This gets the same point across but shows that Mutu herself has claimed this as an inspiration. Just make sure that if you use a quotation, you make sure that you have the source you took it from as a citation. Since you already have BOMB in the article as a source this is more of an aside piece of advice, but it's always good to remember. I've had a few occasions where I forgot to add the citation and had my work reversed because of it.

In any case, I hope that this helps! If you have any questions, feel free to post on my talk page or respond here by posting, as this will let me know that you've responded on your talk page. Cheers! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:56, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

Thank you so much for sharing your review! I really appreciate your feedback and I hope it's alright that I've decided to incorporate the sentence you rewrote (if not, let me know). I am going over my own work now with your advice in mind to make sure it comes across less as my own interpretation and more as a part of the sources I use. Again, thanks so much for your input! Nicpohop (talk) 19:34, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi! I don't mind at all! It looks like you're still fine tuning your writing, but offhand if you continue to make changes like this one you should be ok. Let me know if you need any help with this - writing about art on Wikipedia can be fairly tough, honestly. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:16, 23 May 2017 (UTC)