Room for DialFrost and gotube

last day (15 days later) »

gotube

06:51

Wassup?

DialFrost

Hi @gotube!

I think the earlier chat you made with me was deleted

And I didn't manage to extract out the comments you gave me beforehand

By any chance can you access them? :P

gotube

I'll see what I can do...

Found it. I'll past the comments in one at a time again

I don't want to say negative things about the post publicly because I want the project to succeed, and if the average user reads what I have to say in full, it might sour them. Now, this chat room is technically public, but very few will come in here.

I love how enthusiastic you are about this project, and I wish I could give you my thumbs up, but unfortunately, I can't. A canonical post should read like and be of comparable quality to a chapter from a major ESL textbook, but I found lots of major issues with the style and technical accuracy. The overall structure is mostly good, but in my opinion, the content needs a lot of help.

Here's some of the issues I noticed:

Style issues
* the use of first person throughout ("I would first like to define the terminology")
* conversational tone ("To put that in perspective")
* inefficiency (after reading the first two paragraphs of "Question: What is the Passive Voice?", the reader is no smarter than they were before)
* dull, low-hanging-fruit examples ("John threw the ball")
* exclamation points ("[You don't know who made it!]")
* organization (The sections, "When to use and avoid the passive voice?" and "Pros and cons of the passive voice" are very similar and could be rol…

Technical issues
* bad grammar in examples ("The paintings in the cave were suggested to be made in the stone age")
* "Truth" isn't a reason to use passive voice. The example "Rules are made to be broken" falls under "The person is irrelevant".
* bare claims with no justification or examples ("Additional note, using the passive voice can make things unnecessarily hard for you, and can be wordy and indirect to anybody who is reading your sentences.")
* ambiguous sentences as examples ("The water was polluted" could be a sentence describing the water with the adjective "polluted", rather than…

Now, it's possible that my standards are too high, or that "Good enough is good enough" and it will improve over time as others edit it, but to me, like attracts like, and it's got too many issues to present as if it's pseudo-official.
Like I said, I love that you're doing this and if done right I think it would be a great tool for the community

***

That's it

DialFrost

07:09

Ah tysm

Quick qns, do you think it's a good idea if some of my answers have majority of the content coming from a source? Or should I add more of my own info too

gotube

IMO, it should all be in our own words. If we want to add sources to various parts, that's even better. Nobody wants to read a collection of quotes from various grammar books. We want one voice that's tailored to our audience.

DialFrost

07:29

So... basically I rewrite majority of the post lah

DialFrost

08:21

@gotube ?

8 hours later…

gotube

16:14

last day (15 days later) »

all rooms