# Talk:The Parson's Tale

A sermon is a talk on a religious or moral subject given by a member of the clergy as part of a religious service; a long and tedious talk, especially one telling somebody how or how not to behave. In his prologue he says that he wants to tell a story of “virtuous sentence”. When he says sentence he means sententious. Sententious means tending to use, or full of, maxims and aphorism; inclined to moralizes more than is merited or appreciated; expressing much in few words. Sententious has the connotation of being pompous which is how he acts. That is why he tells a sermon. He wants to moralize people and since he is pompous, he talks in a rather haughty tone.
'Sententious' only became depreciatory later. At the time of this writing 'sentence' meant meaning or wisdom.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.101.42.203 (talk) 20:07, 3 April 2012 (UTC) 

Nice work! Some notes that I imagine would come out in a GA review:

Might be worth a Background section to give context on concepts from The Canterbury Tales that would not be apparent to a reader navigating to this singular "tale", i.e., what is the work's structure, what is noteworthy about its context within the larger work; what is a host, pilgrim, parson, Harry Bailly, etc.
The lede should reflect what is sourced within the article, so the background info in the lede can fit into that Background section; i.e., source it there because it's (a) introduced in the lede, not reflecting the article, and (b) without a source
I don't know the precedence for other articles, but I would recommend translating quotes like "Thou sholdest knytte up wel a greet mateere" similar to how we translate technical language for a general audience
If the seven sins make up most of the text, should they be summarized here?
Traditionally the summary/description/contents would be separate from the analysis (of when this type of treatise was popular, character of the parson, Interpretation, etc.) and/or its development (how Chaucer might have come to write it)
The quotes in the Interpretation can likely be further paraphrased
The See also links would likely be more useful if annotated
No love for short footnotes {{sfn}}?
czar 16:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Hm, good point. That's totally absent from all of the individual Tale articles at present, so I didn't think to add it in, but now that you mention it, it's obviously missing. I'll add something to the "Framing narrative" section.
I wrote the lead as a summary of the article, so if there's something that looks unsourced, that's a clarity problem, not a sourcing problem - can you point out which bit you mean?
Hm. I was quite sure I did do this. Hopefully this doesn't mean I accidentally deleted a paragraph somewhere. On it.
Boy oh boy did I struggle over this bit - and so does everyone else. The truth is that this is really, truly, quite exhaustively boring to anyone who isn't a fifteenth-century English penitent or someone studying fifteenth-century English penitents, so everyone just names the topic, then the scholarly articles tend to jump immediately into the messy details, and the encyclopedic sources spend more time talking about the historiography, what Chaucer's aims might have been, etc. I tried summarizing it in a bit more depth and found that I was basically just describing what the seven sins are, which, well, I can solve that one with a wikilink. If you can articulate some kind of question you had about the seven sins, that might help me come up with something.
They're all together here mostly as a result of the above.
I'm too fond of Donaldson's comment to paraphrase it, but I'll see about the rest.
Good idea.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this format is easier on readers - much more convenient as a reader to be able to see the full citation immediately. As an editor, I much prefer the tidy bibliography you get this way too. I apologize for my poor taste.
...are you sure you don't want to just go ahead and review it? -- asilvering (talk) 03:18, 31 August 2024 (UTC)
Ah, someone beat me to it. Funny that it has a reputation for being boring but I pulled up a metric fuckton of academic papers about it (haven't had time to write out the citations). I don't think we need a blow-by-blow of the plot but I would be surprised if no source went into even cursory overview of the main points. (How did Cooper handle it?) The part that I'm left wondering about is "the analysis of its nature", which would seem to extend beyond a simple definition. By the way, if you want stultifying, check out The Structure of Literature...
Modern readers and critics, however, have found it pedantic and boring Since this is a sweeping claim, it needs heavier evidence than just Donaldson. I've handled this in the past by stacking references (ideally with quotes) that show multiple critics making this point, if it isn't a summative point made plainly in a secondary source. czar 13:33, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Re: boring, I bet that's said outright in Cooper, so I'll check. As for the papers: oh, don't think for a minute that Chaucerians can't write metric fucktons on boring... a lot of it gets very deeply into the weeds. That's part of why I've ended up citing Cooper so much, since she's summarizing the most top-level relevant bits.
Re "plot", such as it is, the thing about the "cursory overview of the main plot" here is that this basically ends up being an accidental content fork of a hypothetical article "medieval views on sin". (I think Cooper probably just says something like "it's a medieval treatise on penitence", haha. I'll check.) But I'll give fleshing it out another try. Hopefully I don't bore everyone as thoroughly as the Parson himself does. -- asilvering (talk) 19:12, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Americanfreedom, can you explain what you mean by "no scare quotes" in your recent edit summary? You've put them back, but I don't see why. It's generally our style policy to avoid scare quotes, and specifically in this case I can say that the sources on the Parson's Tale do indeed call it simply Tale, no scare quotes involved. -- asilvering (talk) 21:09, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

## “Scare Quotes” comment
What I meant was I wasn’t trying to scare anyone with those quotes, what I meant was that the article lede called more of a treatise than a tale. So the quotes were referencing that fact.
Americanfreedom (talk) 20:03, 24 September 2024 (UTC) Americanfreedom (talk) 20:03, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
Ah, "scare quotes" doesn't mean "quotes that scare people". It means to use quotes in the way you were using them. Here: scare quote. -- asilvering (talk) 21:49, 24 September 2024 (UTC)
@Americanfreedom, can you come discuss here please instead of repeatedly reinstating your edit? -- asilvering (talk) 16:59, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

Closing out of some windows from my original pre-GAN searches above and wanted to dump some sources for future consideration:

czar 03:39, 2 October 2024 (UTC)