User:Cvinson12/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?

I am evaluating the Prisoner of Sex.

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?

I chose to evaluate this article because it seemed like a topic that I would find interest in. I have never heard of this book or author before, but it caught my attention based off of the description of the book itself. I found an interest in reading more just from the initial description of what the book was about. I also found the article itself interesting because I found the introduction / summary to be somewhat of an odd description. Therefore, I wanted to know more about this article. My preliminary impression was intrigue, due to the quality of the writing at the beginning of the article. I felt drawn to it in a way that we stare at traffic accidents when driving by. It was like I wanted to read more because I thought it needed a lot of work. It matters that I evaluate an article I am interested in, because it makes it easier to write about and actually evaluate a piece of work if I have somewhat of an interest in it. If there is no interest at all in the article, then it would make it harder for me to complete a evaluation that is helpful to the author(s) of the work.

Evaluate the article

Lead: The beginning of the article doesn't describe exactly what the article is about. It gives a vague description of what Norman Mailer wrote his book about, but doesn't go into specific detail as to what you can expect the article to be about. The beginning of the article does talk about Kate Millett and then she is mentioned again later in the article. Therefore, they do have some connections with the introduction of the article and other topics throughout the article. However, there is little to no description as to who Kate really is and why she is important to this story. I don't believe she should have been a main point in the introduction of the article. Especially, because she is not spoken about through the entire article, just one small portion of it.

Content: The content described in the article was all over the place and made it hard to understand exactly what the main topics were supposed to be. It felt as if there were missing pieces or gaps in the information being shared. It kind of felt like we weren't being told the whole story and it was chopped into pieces that didn't flow together. The way in which the topics/sentences were written is not consistent or coherent. It made it hard for me to read or even understand what I was reading. The words started to get jumbled together and the errors throughout the sentences made it hard for the content to be understood.

Tone and Balance: The tone did not seem neutral or balanced in any way. There are key words being used in the article like, "attack," "talking issue with," "stereotypical," etc. which made it feel as if the writers of this article are upset with what Norman Mailer writes about. It was made known that what Norman Mailer wrote about described situations that were unpleasant. This brought up negative feelings and made it hard as a reader to feel balanced or have a neutral tone to be able to learn about the facts the article was supposed to share. Therefore, the tone could not be seen as neutral and brought up feelings for the reader that could be seen as negative. This does not allow for an experience that is beneficial for anyone reading this article.

Sources and References: Most of the sources I clicked on seemed to have the correct links attached. I will say the sources are decent, but there are definitely missing pieces and more sources could have been used throughout. It seemed that the sources that were used were dated, and it might have been helpful to have some more recent sources. Also, it was stated at the top of the article that this article does solely focus on the primary source, which is the book itself. This article is lacking in secondary sources, and also in sources that readers can use to verify the information being shared. I had not thought about that during my time reading this article. Therefore, I appreciated it being discussed by others before me.

Organization and Writing Quality: The article is not as well-written as it could be and I had a hard time keeping up with exactly what the sentences were referring to in the book. The organization of the paragraphs started off strong in the beginning of the article, because the author(s) does state that Norman Mailer breaks his book into four different sections, and then at the start of two of the paragraphs the author numbers what section they are referring to in the book. The author(s) only do this for the first two paragraphs, but does not do it for the rest. Are we to assume that it goes in order? There are also grammatical and stylistic errors in each of the paragraphs of this article. There are also issues with the flow of the writing and sentence structure throughout this article. If these issues were fixed, the article has some strong potential to be good.

Images and Media: There is only one image for the entirety of this article, and that is the photo for the cover of the first book. It would have been interesting and helpful to see other images to enhance the feelings the readers are experiencing while reading this article. There are a lot of strong opinions and topics being discussed, however, there are no images to help describe exactly what is happening. Images are a wonderful tool and it would be helpful to include them in an article like this one.

Talk Page Discussion: I agreed with the discussion about the sources and lack-thereof, however, I wanted more of a description of what others would have wanted to see included as sources. I did not consider how the author(s) of this article summarized the entire book without using any additional outside sources. It seems interesting that they only summarized this entire book, but didn't discuss how others felt about it. I also strongly agree that the overall tone of this article felt off, and almost felt like a chopped up essay. The points discussed throughout the article seemed like shortened and less supported topics in an essay. I liked the discussion of the images that could have been included in the article, as I had not thought of that.

Overall Impression: The article has potential to be really strong, it just needs some updates and stylistic changes to make it better. The article has a strong outline/start, and the authors have a decent understanding of what Norman Mailer was writing his book about. There definitely needs to be improvements on the structure and flow of the writing, but I do believe the base/outline of the article is strong. It is not a well-developed article and there is a lot more work that has to be one, especially when it comes to further research/sources. Overall, I think this article is underdeveloped, but it has the potential to be a well-developed and well-written article.