User talk:Hannahjayg

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Hello, Hannahjayg, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian 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. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 02:27, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

Reply

Did my reply to your email not reach you? I wrote

You probably shouldn't be approaching this with an end point of "promot[ing] healthy skin and coats", because that's focused on a goal, while Wikipedia articles are supposed to document issues at large. So rather than looking at *healthy* coats, you should approach this from the perspective of how nutrients impact skin and coats.

Whether you can create a stand-alone article depends on how narrowly you can focus what you're trying to talk about. A Wikipedia article should begin with a statement of the form "[Article title] is..." and go on to capture the essence of the topic in a sentence, maybe two. So you need to make sure your article is about a thing - not necessarily a physical thing, but something distinct.

Beyond that, you should follow the instructions in the Editing Wikipedia brochure. Go through the steps in that brochure, and make sure that you have something that you can create an article about. Failing that, you should focus on expanding other articles.

Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:50, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for your help Mburnsy (talk) 04:46, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Minor additions

Feel free to go ahead with those. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:29, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Feedback

Nice work on your draft. A few simple formatting things first

• Some of your references go through your library's proxy server - the url includes "subzero.lib.uguelph.ca". Anyone not logged into the system will only get to the log-in page, they won't be able to get to the journal's webpage. You can use DOIs or PubMed IDs to generate references that will be
• References go after punctuation, not before
• Section headers use sentence capitalization, not title capitalization; only the first word of the title, and proper nouns, should be capitalized.
• Since the article uses American spelling, you should as well. Wikipedia articles can use English or American spelling, but they need to be consistent (and usually, should stick to the first variant used). So "color" rather than "colour".
• Copyedit your work carefully. There are some missing spaced between sentences and at least one word that I believe is a typo (see below).

You might want to be a bit more spare in your language

A dog's coat is an excellent outward indicator of internal well-being

"Good" is fine, and fairly neutral. Whether something is "excellent" is a bit more of a judgment call. It seems trivial, but it's little things that make someone read an article and decide that the tone is "not encyclopedic".

In the table, I recommend changing "Purpose" to "Role" or something of the sort. Purpose suggests intent. You should also be consistent in the table - most cells start with a capital letter, one does not. Mostly you used "and" but in one case you used "&".

Make sure you can back up everything you say. For example, if you say

Zinc is among one of many trace minerals recommended for a dog’s diet.

the article should be able to answer the question "by whom?" - a recommendation is something that a person gives. Instead, you might want to start the section with a simple factual statement like

Zinc contributes to hair growth and can prevent hair from becoming dry and brittle.

Most readers aren't going to read too far into a paragraph, so putting the most important information up front is a good idea.

Remember that Wikipedia is hypertext - readers who want to know more about a topic can always click through to a more detailed article. That means that term that might need explaining to the average reader should be linked the first time it shows up in the article and there's rarely any need to explain what things are in any depth. So instead of writing.

Vitamin A contains retinoic acid and a deficiency in vitamin A can lead to rough coat, scaling of skin and other dermatisis issues like alopecia.

you might consider

Vitamin A deficiency can lead to rough coat, scaling of skin and other dermatitis issues like alopecia.

(I'm guessing that you meant dermatitis there and not dermatisis, but I may be mistaken.) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:00, 28 November 2017 (UTC)