User talk:RedRabbit1983/Helpful advice

General comments
This is an admirable enterprise.

I wonder if the approach is a little too conventional at the moment (since much of this is duplicated in other guides, including the MOS). Like many guides, it adopts an impersonal, and sometimes imperative, style which may not be the most congenial for Wikipedia. I suggest a humorous (but not sarcastic) miscellany, expressed as the writer's personal bugbears. Wikipedia editors might find this attractive; and if it were set out as opinion (informed opinion, certainly), it wouldn't matter if they disagreed.

I also wonder if it would be best to concentrate directly on issues arising from the peculiarities of copyediting Wikipedia articles (see suggestions below).

Specific observations

 * It might be worth giving full references for quotations, as if this were an article—plus a Harvard ref in the text, perhaps, in shortened form (Gower, Plain Words, 1954).


 * It might be of value to compile more examples illustrating the various points, for example for "Clichés", "Comma splice", and others. This would be an opportunity for humour: the more of that the merrier. Better examples might be found for "Hanging participle", I think. It is probably worth (apart from humorous ones) confining examples to the sort of thing one might see in a Wikipedia article (I didn't find the Fran Bailey example luminous: one almost expects bad prose in newspapers; and the "former tourism minister" is an example of journalistic cramming).


 * I disagree with the "In 1941" point. I nearly always add commas after introductory phrases; it is good English and precludes a multitude of problems. It's not compulsory, I admit, but neither is it wrong or bad style, in my opinion. Separating the introductory clause from the main clause is one of the classic uses of the comma.


 * I don't really follow the "walked in" examples. I am not sure they stand up.

Some suggestions for inclusion
One could go on forever, but it might be worth concentrating on typical Wikipedia issues. Here are a few that occur to me:


 * but: The need for it to be reductive or adversative (I see it too often used for mild contrast, or even where there is no contrast at all); also the ease with which it can be removed to create crisper prose (a full stop or a semicolon often does the                           job better).


 * proper noun in possessive case: Too often, editors proceed as if the presence of the proper noun in the possessive case is equivalent to the proper noun as a subject ("Napoleon's victory made him the ruler of Europe": "him" has no person to refer back to). This is a frequent mistake on Wikipedia.


 * hyphens: A highly complex matter (when it comes to compounds) that too few editors grasp.


 * parallelism: People might appreciate some advice on the value of this rhetorical nicety (also called "matching parts"). Few articles observe the principle, and the result is often a series of little infelicities all down the page, in my opinion. (I am not advocating fussy Latinate sentence structure: the problem manifests itself even in short phrases: "George Bush is conservative and a traditionalist" would be finer as "George Bush is a conservative and a traditionalist".)


 * correlatives: This relates to the above: few editors understand how to use "either...or", etc. ("both...and", "whether...or", and many others).

qp10qp (talk) 21:20, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
 * remote relatives: I see a tendency on Wikipedia to separate antecedents from relatives in a way that sometimes obscures meaning. Even when the meaning remains clear, such sentences can sound clumsy or overpacked ("He gave an impassioned speech on the state of Hyde Park, in which he made it clear that more investment was needed"). When I copyedit, I often find myself moving a relative pronoun to immediately follow the noun it modifies. (Talking of humour, I collected this (genuine) cracker: "One of the fighter pilots whose exploits made him a living legend was "sailor" Malan, a former seaman from South Africa, pictured here with his dog, who shot down more than thirty German aircraft".)