On Dec 17, 2008, at 2:51 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:

I'm a person who likes examples. Phil, do you have an example article where something is written a certain way, or is not, and you'd like it to be something different and what?

The examples I have are more articles that seem to me fragile - it's likely that they violate the policy, but they've remained stable thus far.

That said:

[[Ender's Game]] has, in its plot summary, the following: "After a confrontation with a school bully, Stilson, that (unknown to Ender for the majority of the novel) leaves Stilson dead." Aside from the grammatical problem there, there are some other problems here:

In practice, the question of Stilson's death is fairly curious in the novel. The degree to which Ender knows about it is left carefully ambiguous. Furthermore, the revelation that Stilson has died is kept ambiguous - the fact is partially kept from the reader as well as Ender - both Ender and the reader spend most of the novel wondering about this - and both come to realize more and more that Stilson is dead every time Ender returns to thinking about it.

Explaining this while restricting myself purely to description is impossible, as the novel works precisely because of implication of things left unsaid. (Which is par for the course for literary writing) But it is equally problematic to skip over the problem of Stilson, as it is a crucial part of the novel.

[[Chosen (Buffy episode)]] says "The core four share a moment talking about going to the mall after saving the world which causes Giles to say "the earth is definitely doomed," echoing the end of the second episode of the first season of Buffy." This echoing is transparently clear - the scenes have similar dialogue, the same set of characters (who are the core characters of the entire series), and the line about the Earth being doomed is repeated in each. This, however, is definitely not on the list of what's allowed by NOR.

[[The Yellow Wallpaper]] says "Eventually the woman descends into complete insanity, thinking she is a woman who has escaped from inside the wallpaper." This is completely an interpretation of the story, as the narrator is an unreliable narrator. The narrator never says she descends into complete insanity - in fact, she says she is a woman who has escaped from inside the wallpaper. However it is a fundamental interpretation - no summary of the story is possible without understanding the unreliable narrator.

And in [[Jacques Derrida]], we hit a huge problem - everything Derrida wrote was very hard to understand. The good secondary sources are also hard to understand. That leaves poor secondary sources and criticism of Derrida, which usually focuses on his lack of clarity. The only way to get a decent, NPOV summary of Derrida is to work through hard sources that require specialist knowledge.

-Phil