Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Peer review/Hazel Miner

Hazel Miner

I'd like to improve upon this article and hopefully bring it up to Good Article or Featured Article status at some point. I've added references and links to other Web sites and fleshed out the story since I initially wrote the article. Photos of her are hard to find, but I'm hoping to get one from one of the historical societies. --Bookworm857158367 03:43, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Awadewit

I thought that this was a good piece on Hazel. I don't know if FAs can be so short, but I wouldn't see why not. My major suggestion would be to vary your sentence structure in order to make the blizzard narrative more interesting. You have a lot of SVO (SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT) constructions. I agree that a picture would be a nice addition. If you can't find a picture of Hazel herself, perhaps a picture from one of the ballads? Or even a picture of a blizzard? I was also wondering if this story was connected with Laura Ingalls Wilder's _The Long Winter_ in any way. I have a vague recollection of a similar tale within that book. Awadewit 10:36, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for looking at it. I've added some images, citations and quite a bit to the text. What do you think? I read the Wilder book years ago, but it would have been about 40 years before this blizzard and in South Dakota, not North Dakota. --Bookworm857158367 04:02, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I definitely think it's better. There are still some awkwardly worded sentences in the blizzard narrative, particularly those that employ the "and then" construction, but I would definitely say it's an improvement. By the way, the Wilder books were written in the 1930s and 1940s and were far from chronologically or geographically accurate, so I think that connection might still be possible. Wilder and her daughter used incidents from their own lives and from the lives of others to create the narratives. Awadewit 06:17, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Yannismarou

• "Hazel spread two blankets, told Emmet and Myrdith to lie down, and then spread a third blanket atop them. She told the younger children to keep moving to stay warm." Maybe the prose is a bit repetitive here.
• "They sang all four verses of "America the Beautiful," a song they had sung during opening exercises at the country school that morning. They prayed the Lord's Prayer. Hazel ..." The bolded sentence looks to me a bit choppy as it is there.
• "Other blizzard deaths". I don't know if this section is relevant to the article. This is Miner's biography; not an article about the blizzard.
• One citation ("Gullickson, Lucille, "Hazel Miner, Angel of the Prairies," Center (N.D.) Republican, May 30, 2002") is repeated without reason. Check Multiple insertion of the same reference.--Yannismarou 12:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I rewrote the portions of the article you mentioned, removed the "other blizzard deaths" section and gave those victims their own articles, and fixed the citations. An improvement? --Bookworm857158367 22:06, 14 February 2007 (UTC)