User talk:Wd497311/sandbox

I think you've added good and useful information. I'm tickled by the fact that the original post includes the warning that this may include detailed information of interest to only a limited audience, given the amount of information we have found on male athletes. I don't know that I have ever seen that tag on a male athlete's page? SarahEMC2 (talk) 12:07, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Formatting

Hi Wd497311. I think when you created your draft you copied the article rather than the text (what you see in the window when you click "edit"). I've tried to recover the original text and your edits to the page, so the changes you've made aren't lost. Let me know if I've missed anything. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:00, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

My suggestion

An article like this can often best be improved by editing it ruthlessly rather than adding material. Looking at the article you're targeting, I'd say the Notre Dame section can be condensed considerably and most readers (and especially other editors) would welcome that as an improvement. Cutting down an article is really hard and requires more care than adding new content, but I think a shorter article would be better here. This isn't a criticism of your prose, of course! The article was already quite large when you selected it.

How to do this:

• Read the high school section closely, then read the college section.
  • Notice how the high school section starts with a broad overview (where she played, how she did overall) then moves to specific highlights, namely her state tournaments and the McD's game. The college section gets lost in the details.
  • The college section switches back and forth between team/university names at least every other paragraph. Apart from being somewhat confusing (synecdochy is not all that useful as a writing strategy for an encyclopedia), it adds bulk to the section.
  • Box scores are sometimes useful in the text of the article, but can also be pushed off to the source we're referencing. Something like "In the losing effort, Diggins finished with 23 points, 3 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 steals. She made 8 of 9 free-throws in the game, including two with 40.7 seconds remaining. But the sophomore struggled from beyond the arc, sinking only 1-of-5 three-point attempts. Diggins also committed 6 turnovers, the last one ending Notre Dame's chances for good as the game clock wound down." is basically a whole paragraph devoted to one game in her sophomore year. Granted, it's an important game, but since everything else is covered in similar detail, the reader can't intuit that because it's lost in the remaining details.
• Don't be afraid to look at some prose and say "boy, that's bad, I should fix it"! A lot of the weight in these sections comes from the sportswritery jargon used and the unnecessary puffery ("Diggins continued her stellar play...", "She has also showed her prowess as a floor-leader...", etc.). We don't need to say in the voice of the encyclopedia that she's great. The facts will do that for us. Just remove most of the phrases like that and see if the paragraphs still make sense. I'll bet most of them do.

Concision is a virtue in itself for most wikipedia articles. A shorter, clearer article which conveys the same information will be much more helpful to readers than a longer article attempting to cover all details. Let me know if you need any help with this. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:20, 17 April 2015 (UTC)