User talk:Cdunlap/sandbox

Good progress it appears...--Dan Ryan (talk) 03:08, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Chelsea:

Looks like you have a good idea of how this page can improve (like adding a fuller intro; room to expand on his life, etc).

Here are some of my initial thoughts/comments:

1) Park taught at Harvard, until Booker T. Washington invited him to the Tuskegee Institute to work on racial issues in the southern U.S. He joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1914, staying there until his retirement in 1936. He continued teaching until his death, however, at Fisk UniversityBold text. Park died in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of seventy-nine.

That part doesn't seem to flow/make sense. Why is it there? Perhaps you can take it out or have it lead in to the idea of his transfer to Fisk University better.

2) The boxed quotes in the "Life" section are interesting, but I am not sure how they fit in context. Maybe better to have a section that's more like, "His Beliefs"/ "[Popular/Famous] Quotes," or have the statements lead/follow some sort of factual/cited argument about, perhaps, why he himself might have been (or not been) a "marginal man," or why he would urge someone to do this: "get the seat of your pants dirty in real research."

3) "Park probably contributed more ideas for analysis of racial relations and cultural contacts than any other modern social scientist."[1]

I think that this quote, found in the first paragraph of the "Work" section would fit better earlier in the paragraph, rather than coming after a description of one of his studies.
I may hesitate to use the quote because it doesn't sound neutral

Chelsea:

I agree with the suggestions above and also think it might be helpful for you to take a look at some of the highly rated sociology articles on the wiki project page if you are having trouble starting. It was helpful for me to see what well organized wikipedia pages looked like so I could organize my thoughts. Also, it might be worth your wild to look further into the significance of the Chicago School. I thought this article was pretty concise: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~lutters/pubs/1996_SWLNote96-1_Lutters,Ackerman.pdf. Also, if you have time, Park did some interesting work on deviance and social control. There's a good book on this in the Mills Library, I think its just called Social Control. Good Luck! -Rachel --Rbareiss (talk) 22:05, 28 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]