On 5/23/08, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
You can have a neutral article that reads better than many of ours, though. Certainly we don't want to be using all kinds of fancy literary devices - we want to just state the facts, but we can do that without ending up with a sequence of disconnect sentences. A lot of the problems come from the fact that articles are often written one sentence at a time (after the initial creation, at least) - those sentences need to be better integrated.
It's a feature of having lots of people edit that articles tend to lack flow. There are very few editors who actually read a section of an article before they edit it. People believe that a factoid is missing, so they stick it in, regardless of what it does to the structure of the paragraph. It means that every article needs someone on hand to be endlessly copyediting it, which is a thankless task, especially where it's a contentious topic, because then you're accused of POV pushing if you move their factoid to retain flow.
Sarah