Wikipedia:Peer review/How the García Girls Lost Their Accents/archive1

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for November 2008.

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I want to obtain Good and hopefully Featured Article status upon completion.

Thanks, Kyalkin (talk) 20:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Since I have read neither the primary nor the secondary works mentioned in the article, I can't assess whether the article is comprehensive. Even so, I will try to help by giving some general suggestions for improvement.

• The writing is generally clean and clear and well-organized. However, I see many small errors that a copyeditor would probably catch and fix. For example, in the "Part III" section, the citation 18 superscript should appear after the comma; "voodoo practicing" needs a hyphen; "although much her her family was not so lucky" has an accidental echo word; "An Accidental Surprise" should appear in quotation marks rather than italics, and the citation 21 sentence has an extra period. Small errors like this appear here and there throughout the article and need to be fixed.

• The lead should be a summary of the whole article. Your existing lead reads well, but I would suggest adding at least a mention of the critical reception.

• The first sentence of "Background and historical context" makes no sense. It says, "The 1960's were adjective in the Dominican Republic as the Trujillo revolution and dictatorship was taking place, meaning total control over the military, the economy and the people." You might try "In the 1960s, the Trujillo revolution in the Dominican Republic led to dictatorship and its total control of the military, the economy, and the people."

• It would be helpful to group absolutely identical citations into a single reference note with alphabetic superscripts by using the <"ref = "name"> device. For example, I inserted <ref name= "Luis 840"> into the inline citation for citation 36. I then added <ref name = "Luis 840"/> to the other instances of this same citation. Now five citations appear as one. I'd suggest doing this with the other citations that can be grouped in this way. (Don't neglect to add the end ref frontslash in the second and subsequent uses of ref name.)

• In the "Style and structure" section, inline citations such as (Sirias 2001, 19) begin to appear. I'd suggest changing these to the harvnb format you've used elsewhere.

• In the first sentence of "Plot summary", instead of "The novel, written episodically and in reverse-chronological order, is fifteen chapters... ", I might suggest "consists of fifteen chapters".

• Dates such as 1989-1972 can be collapsed to 1989–72, and the hyphen in these constructions should be changed to an en dash per the Manual of Style. Please see WP:ENDASH. Page ranges also need en dashes rather than hyphens. Thus, "Barak 1998, pp. 174-175" should be "Barak 1998, pp. 174–75". You can insert a code for an en dash. It is a string consisting of an ampersand followed by ndash followed by a semicolon. Look at this review in edit mode to see how the code looks.

• I don't think you need the links between the notes and the references. For one thing, it turns the notes into a sea of blue. For another, it may be seen as confusing or even patronizing since the links go only a few inches away to where a reader would normally look for this information.

I hope these brief remarks are helpful. If you find them so, please considering reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 20:29, 18 November 2008 (UTC)