User talk:AStreetCarNamedDesire2014/sandbox

American Clock

Hi! Your draft looks excellent so far. And it looks like you have a great start on adding authoritative citations. You need to tweak a couple of section headers so they display correctly - but overall you are in great shape, making progress! -Theresa, Humanities Librarian Tburress (talk) 18:17, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yoooo - here's my comment for your page! First of all, good job. You've obviously beefed up this article. Here comes the criticism!

1. You could very easily combine the second and third sentences of your intro paragraph. Something like, "Written in the 1980's, the play is about families or individuals living in 1930's America during The Great Depression," would work much better. It's also important that you disclose the exact year, rather than just 1980's. I also have a feeling you were trying to emphasize the importance of the play's publication date. If so, write about it!

2. "Struggling with the identity of his play, Miller revised his play in 1984. Arthur Miller said that The American Clock was not complete when it was first put on." - these sentences can be combined/condensed. You might consider changing it to something like, "Struggling with the identity of his play, Miller revised The American Clock in 1984, stating that the play's first performance was not complete."

3. "In the 1984 Mark Taper production was the closest he felt to balance. Even the New York Times felt that The American Clock needed much a revision explained in their editorial published in the 1980's[3]." - a few obvious mistakes here. The first sentence is unclear! Here's my take: "Mark Taper's 1984 production of the play came closest to realizing Miller's vision." Your second sentence seems to have 'needed' and 'much' out of place, as well as 'explained'.

4. "Two years after this Peter Wood did his own hilarious rendition of the Mark Taper play at the British National Theatre. This made Arthur Miller revise his production into a vaudeville, a type of production that mixed different types of acts with popular music of the time. [2]" - You have two unclear pronoun references! Try replacing "two years after this" with "In 1986" -- Try beginning the second sentence with "This production made..." Finally, your explanation of what a vaudeville is may be unnecessary! You can easily attach a link to the wiki page for vaudevilles, making it a hotlink.

5. Your Plot Summary seems to describe the characters and the plot at the same time. You should consider rewriting your plot summary. It doesn't have to be a complete synopsis, but you'd be well served to describe nothing but the plot in this section. You can describe the characters in your Characters section.

Hope this helps you a bit! Andrew.blackowiak (talk) 04:49, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your draft looks great. One suggestion that I have besides cleaning up a few grammatical errors is dividing the plot summary up a little bit just so it's easier to read, but other than that good job! :) Dejawhitfield (talk) 05:59, 14 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Draft is looking pretty sweet, I have to say. Fixing up the minor details (basic editing, grammatical errors, etc.) seems to be the only glaring issue at this point, which isn't even a very big issue. Also, a little more time for the plot summary may be helpful to flesh out just the plot here, leaving character descriptions elsewhere. other than that, great job! RachelNCF (talk) 16:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]