User talk:Sci M

Sinclair Lewis
Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed your recent edits to this article and read the source you cited. The Lewis article certainly needs expansion, especially in coverage of his development as a writer. However—I believe this essay applies to your edit since the sequence of ideas are overly similar and if used in this manner should be quoted and credited to Vidal in the added text rather than merely footnoted (comparison of edit with source shown below.)

text you added—
 * His literary influences included Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling and the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but it was H. G. Wells' The History of Mr. Polly that would directly influence his early works.

text in the source—
 * Dickens, Scott, Kipling were his first influences. But it was H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr. Polly that became for him a paradigm for his own first novel.

I hope you return to this article. I have a few suggestions:
 * rephrase the material you added and place it in the Early career section
 * be sure to retain the qualifiers of the judgement fro the Vidal material, e.g. "first influences" rather than merely "influences"
 * a Sinclair Lewis bio might be a better source than a review; this review and a bio would be even better
 * more details of Lewis's development as a novelist are needed.

If you have any questions, please ask me here on your talk page as I am watching it and will see any replies. If you think I made a mistake, discussing it at Talk:Sinclair Lewis will allow more editors to participate in the discussion. Again, welcome! Neonorange (Phil) 07:29, 23 September 2017 (UTC)