- A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for July 2009.
This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because a lot of work has gone into improving it and I would welcome any comments and suggestions on how it can be further improved in the hopes of getting it promoted to GA status.
Thanks, J.D. (talk) 14:29, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: This is a good start but needs further work to reach GA. Here are some suggestions for improvement.
Lead
- MOS:INTRO says in part, "The lead section should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it can stand on its own as a concise version of the article." A good rule of thumb is to at least mention each of the main text sections. The existing lead says nothing about the "Development", "Reaction", or "Awards and nominations" sections.
- "The film opened in limited release on December 26, 2008, and expanded wide on January 23, 2009." - Missing word?
Synopsis
- "When he returns home late, April surprises him with a birthday cake and a proposal that they move to Paris, with April working as a secretary to support the family so that Frank can discover what he truly wants to do in life." - "With" is a relatively weak connector in a construction like this. Suggestion: "When he returns home late, April surprises him with a birthday cake and a proposal that they move to Paris. April plans to work as a secretary to support the family so that Frank can discover what he truly wants to do in life."
- "Helen then starts to ramble on of her disapproval of the Wheelers as Howard turns down his hearing aid as to drown out his wife's voice." - Suggestion: "Helen then starts to ramble on about her disapproval of the Wheelers as Howard turns down his hearing aid to drown out his wife's voice."
Development
- The Manual of Style generally deprecates extremely short paragraphs and sections. Two possible fixes are to expand or to merge. I think you could safely merge the orphan paragraph at the end of this section with the paragraph above it.
Critical reception
- MOS:QUOTE says in part, "A long quote (more than four lines, or consisting of more than one paragraph, regardless of number of lines) is formatted as a block quotation, which Wikimedia's software will indent from both margins. Block quotes are not enclosed in quotation marks (especially including decorative ones such as those provided by the {{|tl|cquote}} template, used only for pull quotes). Block quotes can be enclosed between a pair of <blockquote>...</blockquote> HTML tags... ". For this reason, the blockquote tags would be my choice to replace the fancy quotes. Because of their length, the Todd McCarthy and David Ansen and Kirk Honeycutt and possibly the Peter Travers quotations should also be blockquotes. This is an awful lot of quoted material. It would probably be better to paraphrase some of this material and to be a bit more selective about direct quotations.
"Top ten lists
- MOS:#Bulleted and numbered lists says in part, "Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs." For this reason, I would suggest rendering the material in the "Speech and Debate" section as straight prose. This section would be easy to render as a straight prose paragraph added to the bottom of the "Critical reception section". The "Top ten lists" subsection could then disappear.
Awards and nominations
- The two-item list at the beginning could be rendered as a single paragraph of straight prose.
References
- WP:MOSNUM#Format consistency says in part, "Dates in article references should all have the same format." For this reason, you need to pick either yyyy-mm-dd format or m-d-y format and use it throughout the citations. The existing citations have mixed formats.
- MOS:UNLINKDATES says in part, "Dates should not be linked purely for the purpose of autoformatting (even though in the past this was considered desirable)." For this reason, the linked dates in the citations should be unlinked. Other parts of many of the citations are also overlinked.
- Citation 12 has a dead url.
General
- The dabfinder that lives here finds two links that go to disambiguation pages rather than to their intended targets.
I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:21, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for all of these suggestions and comments. Much appreciated!--J.D. (talk) 18:21, 20 July 2009 (UTC)