Wikipedia:Peer review/Howie Morenz/archive1

Howie Morenz
This peer review discussion has been closed. This has gone through 2 FA nominations in the past few months and failed both, mainly because of my poor prose writing skills. With that in mind, I'd hope that the prose of the article would be the focal point of any review, so I can get it up to FA status.

Thanks, Kaiser matias (talk) 04:40, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: After reading your comments and the ones from the last try at FA, I did quite a bit of minor copyediting, especially in the lower sections. I think if you go through the article again, you can probably find groups of sentences that could be varied by changing the structure of some of them. For example, at the beginning of the "Montreal Canadiens (1923–34)" section, the first seven sentences start with the same subject-verb pattern: "Morenz arrived", "He made", "Morenz finished", "The Canadiens finished", "Morenz scored", "The Canadiens then played", "They defeated". The eighth sentence starts in a different way (thank goodness), but the ninth returns to "He scored". Any sentences (or phrases or individual words such as "Morenz") that echo each other so many times in a row tend to make readers nod off, and I think that might be what happened to the reviewers at FAC. It shouldn't be terribly hard to fix this. Just look for blocks of text with repetitive sentence patterns and vary the pattern by recasting one or more sentences in the block. For example, the fourth sentence of the block mentioned here might read, "Finishing first in the league for the first time in five years, the Canadiens faced the Senators in the playoffs for the NHL championship." Note that I also tightened that fourth sentence by trying to say the same thing with fewer words. In general, that's also worth doing, and I'm sure you can find a few other places where things can be said more efficiently. I don't want to go overboard with my changes, so I'm leaving these decisions to you. If you can vary the sentence patterns (or phrases or individual words) a bit more and tighten a bit more, I think you are apt to succeed at FAC. Here are a few other suggestions.

Lead
 * "In 14 seasons in the NHL he placed in the top 10 leading scorers 10 times." - Rather than repeating "in 14 seasons", it might be better to say "During his NHL career, he placed... "
 * "Morenz died from complications of a broken leg... " - I'd break the second paragraph in two and start the third paragraph with this sentence. A three-paragraph lead would be fine for an article of this size.

Early life
 * "After starting in goal... " - Does this mean "after starting as goaltender"? Not every reader will understand the jargon.
 * "Morenz became a forward" - Wikilink forward?

Montreal Canadiens (1923–34)
 * "Morenz finished the 1923–24 season, his first in the NHL, with thirteen goals and three assists in twenty-four games." - I'd suggest using words throughout the article for numbers from one to nine and digits for anything bigger unless a sentence, like this one, has a mixture of the two groups (smaller than 10, bigger than nine). In such cases, I suggest using all digits. Suggestion: "Morenz finished the 1923–24 season, his first in the NHL, with 13 goals and 3 assists in 24 games."
 * "As Morenz was not playing to his previous level, reports of the Canadiens wanting to trade him began appearing in Montreal newspapers." - Rather than repeating "not playing to his previous level", you might just begin the paragraph with "Reports that the Canadiens wanted to trade him began appearing... ".

I hope this helps get the article over the hump. Finetooth (talk) 23:51, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I went through and made some changes. I looked through and tried to create some changes, so I'd be interested to hear what you think. Kaiser matias (talk) 02:53, 16 September 2009 (UTC)