User talk:TEKARNSIDE

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The Second Sex
Hello, please don't take this as being a criticism of your excellent work but I have flagged The Second Sex as being too long and in need of shortening and cleanup to make a better article. I read your synopsis and it was helpful to me to understand the gist of the book, but the trouble is that at over 20,000 words it appears to be too long for the general reader. I would wonder if it might be a good idea to get the opinion of an administrator as to what would be the best compromise between conciseness and completeness. I looked at it and I would be very hesitant to cut it as I might be cutting the parts which need to be left. Also I'm uncertain what parts are directly from the source and what parts (if any) might be inadvertently an unpublished synthesis. (I'm not calling it such, but I can see more than one writing style in it.) Thanks.Trilobitealive (talk) 22:41, 30 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Although I agree that it is too long, that very thorough summary certainly helped me with a class assignment. Thanks for the hard work!  --Crosscountrycpjon (talk) 03:57, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I haven't been back to these Beauvoir pages for a long time. I'm not surprised that my summary of Le Deuxieme Sexe has been considered to be too long for inclusion on the Second Sex page as such. On the other hand, I remain utterly convinced that it will be of great use to some, as the comment by Crosscountrycpjon confirms. Ideally, I think it would be a link of some kind from from the Second Sex page. If someone can arrange this I, personally, would be well satisfied and others would benefit. Having spent a fair portion of my professional life working on, and publishing (refereed) articles and books on, Simone de Beauvoir, I am not impressed when readers cast a quick eye over the summary and simply dismiss it as 'too long'. Such comments say more about the readers than about the quality of the summary. What would be much more significant is if anyone were to point out places where the summary is inaccurate. I believe in the difference between biased and 'objective' statements, and I think the whole Wikipedia project is based on such a belief. My summary is a careful attempt to encapsulate in a relatively short compass - without any evaluative comment of my own - exactly what Beauvoir says in a French text of nearly 1,000 (largish) pages. If readers have any specific criticisms of it within that context, I would be genuinely interested to hear them. The length of my own piece (which is not 'research', or an 'essay', or even an 'article' - it's just a summary) relates to my precise intentions. To produce a shorter summary would involve more significant judgements about importance and would inevitably be more contentious. The great controversy about Parshley's English translation is partly - though only partly - about sections of the text that he simply omitted. Indeed, I eventually uploaded my summary after engaging in discussion about Parshley's translation. It became clear that, even by their own admission, many had not read the complete English text, let alone the original French one. It seemed to me that I was providing a service by offering a very systematic and accurate summary of Beauvoir's book, in English. So, in short, why not make my summary a link from the Second Sex page, for those who find it useful, and take up with me any faults that you find in it? TEKARNSIDE (talk) 17:49, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Just for now I'm adding a short synopsis while reading the second translation. I left a note on the article's talk page. I thought your essays were great. Thank you very much! -SusanLesch (talk) 03:31, 9 September 2011 (UTC)