User:Cesayvonne/Evaluate an Article

Evaluate an article

This is where you will complete your article evaluation. Please use the template below to evaluate your selected article.

• Name of article: Speech Acts
• Briefly describe why you have chosen this article to evaluate.

I chose this article because it was one of the few on the approved list that I knew and felt comfortable with my previous knowledge of the topic, so I feel more prepared to evaluate it.

Lead

Guiding questions

The Lead includes a good introductory sentence. however, after that, it gets very technical, and quickly introduces several new words with no explanation. If you look through the sections of the article, you can see that those topics are covered, however, the lead does not do an acceptable job of summarizing them. The Lead is very concise, but it spends most of its time quoting or referencing other people, and does a poor job describing the article.

• Does the Lead include an introductory sentence that concisely and clearly describes the article's topic?
• Does the Lead include a brief description of the article's major sections?
• Does the Lead include information that is not present in the article?
• Is the Lead concise or is it overly detailed?

Content

Guiding questions

All of the content is very relevant to the topic. The one thing that I see is missing is a section on locutionary speech acts. The article mentions it twice in other sections and all other types of speech acts get their own section with more relevant information but locutionary speech acts do not. There is also a couple of times where a Linguist or Philosopher is mentioned by name with no reference to who they were or why they matter in this context. Perhaps a short interjection with an explanation or a link to their page might be helpful. Also worth mentioning is that the History section does a poor job of establishing a timeline of events. It presents itself as more of a big mush of ideas and philosophies of the past, followed by a short explanation of the modern linguistic theory.

• Is the article's content relevant to the topic?
• Is the content up-to-date?
• Is there content that is missing or content that does not belong?

Tone and Balance

Guiding questions

The article seems to be pretty well balanced. The tone, although neutral, is very technical. Even for a student in Linguistics, it is a muddy read. The article is heavy handed with the jargon it uses and it is unnecessarily wordy in many places. There are unneeded "that"s and repetitions from previous sentences.

• Is the article neutral?
• Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
• Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
• Does the article attempt to persuade the reader in favor of one position or away from another?

Sources and References

Guiding questions

Everything seems to be well cited except the sections "Indirect Speech Acts" and "Uses in Technology". These two sections have no citations at all, which is jarring. The citations that are used seem pretty good. Most are from the 1950's and 60's. But a few are more recent. Most of the sources come from journals or conferences and seem like the are reliable and thorough. The links I clicked on worked just fine.

• Are all facts in the article backed up by a reliable secondary source of information?
• Are the sources thorough - i.e. Do they reflect the available literature on the topic?
• Are the sources current?
• Check a few links. Do they work?

Organization

Guiding questions

This article is well sourced, cited, organized, and researched. However, it is written in a way that makes it almost useless to anyone outside of linguistics. It is not consice where it can be, it is not clear unless you already know a lot about the topic, and it is most certainly not easy to read.

• Is the article well-written - i.e. Is it concise, clear, and easy to read?
• Does the article have any grammatical or spelling errors?
• Is the article well-organized - i.e. broken down into sections that reflect the major points of the topic?

Images and Media

Guiding questions

There were no images or media in this article, which might have made this article more accessible to the reader.

• Does the article include images that enhance understanding of the topic?
• Are images well-captioned?
• Do all images adhere to Wikipedia's copyright regulations?
• Are the images laid out in a visually appealing way?

Checking the talk page

Guiding questions

This article is a level 4 vital article being worked on by the Linguistics wiki-project.

There is a lot of conversation about the history section of the article and making sure that information is correct, and a lot of talk about making sure everything that needs to be covered is covered.

• What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
• How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
• How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?

Overall impressions

Guiding questions

The article is considered very important but is recognized as very technical and unreadable.

The article does a good job covering everything that needs to be covered and staying neutral in its tone. It also has good citations.

The article is well developed, but just needs some work when it comes to the writing style and target audience.

• What is the article's overall status?
• What are the article's strengths?
• How can the article be improved?
• How would you assess the article's completeness - i.e. Is the article well-developed? Is it underdeveloped or poorly developed?

Optional activity

• Choose at least 1 question relevant to the article you're evaluating and leave your evaluation on the article's Talk page. Be sure to sign your feedback

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