User talk:Jocelynnjocy

Welcome!

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

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:53, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks for the feedback Jocelyn Alma760 (talk) 19:42, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Why we need elective courses in Education

The article Why we need elective courses in Education has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

See Wikipedia:Not Essay and this FAQ

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. FallingGravity (talk) 06:37, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Nomination of Why we need elective courses in education for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Why we need elective courses in education is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Why we need elective courses in education until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Ethanlu121 (talk) 00:35, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Essays and articles

Hi! I noticed that your article Why we need elective courses in education is up for deletion and I thought I'd give a bit of explanation as to why this is happening. Ultimately it's because the article is written like a personal essay and I've got a piece written about this here. Sorry that this is going to be long, but I wanted to really give you a good explanation about all of this!

Two of main differences between an encyclopedia article and a personal essay are tone and original research. In an essay you are free to draw your own conclusions and insert personal opinion into articles, whereas these things should not be in an encyclopedia article. Encyclopedias are meant to be an overview of already existing research and coverage that explicitly state the claims on a specific topic and it's also supposed to be (or should at least try to be) as neutral on the topic as possible. That's why it's generally not a good idea to start an article that takes a definite side in something. While I do agree that elective courses can be helpful in any stage of education, an encyclopedia article shouldn't be written to convince others of this opinion since it can come across as biased and/or one-sided, even if this wasn't your intent.

Another big difference between the two is that encyclopedia articles tend to be fairly general for the most part unless there's a lot of coverage to justify a more specific article. For example, we could have an article on gardening but an article that deals with gardening and snails would likely be too specific. In cases like that we'd usually just cover that in a subsection in the main article about snails (Snail#In_agriculture) if there are enough sources to warrant coverage. It's kind of a tricky process sometimes, to be honest, and one that most editors kind of learn through trial and error.

Now that said, here's what I think would be a good solution to the article: I think that it'd be a good idea to work on expanding and improving the section for electives at Course_(education)#Elective_and_required_courses. The article for general courses needs a lot of work and there might be justification for an article for electives separate from the main article, but the first course of action should be to improve the main article.

Something else to be careful about is sourcing. You relied heavily on this blog source from Prep Scholar. There are two issues with this source. The first is that it's ultimately a self-published source since it has little to no editorial oversight that Wikipedia can verify. The second is that Prep Scholar is an e-commerce site, as it's main goal is to sell the consumer SAT prep courses. This means that anything coming from them will be considered suspect, especially as the article ends with them directing readers to their products. You might be able to use sites like this sometimes when it comes to personal essays, but even that depends greatly on how you're using them. If you're using them as an example of online test prep sites then you could justify it, but they should not be used as an authority on the subject because they're not an unbiased source and it's hard to verify their credentials. Of course it's hard to find anyone completely unbiased, but in general it's best to go with academic sources in atabases like JSTOR or academic publishers like the University of Virginia Press, since their credentials are well known and are fairly discerning. Sources like this one are fine, although ideally you'd want something that would expand more on the topic at hand, just for the sake of ease.

Outlets like the New York Times are good since they're seen as a reliable source, but be careful of how you use it. I'm pointing this one out because you used a large block quote from the article, something you did with another source. You can use quotes in encyclopedia articles, but they should be used sparingly and shouldn't be more than 1-2 sentences long at max. Anything more than that can run the risk of being considered a potential copyright issue (WP:COPYVIO), so it should be a brief quote. It's usually better to write things in your own words.

Another thing to be careful of is that you linked to an article via EBSCOHost. You can link to things via this website - I use academic databases all the time since I have access to them via work and school. However the thing to remember is that not everyone does and clicking on the link doesn't bring up the article in question. This is why you need to make sure that you give a full citation for the source material, which would include the author's name, publication, and other material that you'd typically see in an APA or MLA citation. This is needed just in case someone wants to read the source material, either to check it against the article or (equally likely) to just read it for their own purposes and research.

I hope that all of this doesn't overwhelm you! I just wanted to make sure to give you a good explanation as to why things are happening the way that they are. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 09:27, 16 March 2016 (UTC)