Talk:Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes/Archive 1

message: I am a new professor to St. John Fisher College so I am not yet on the website.  My email is kfasching-varner@sjfc.edu and we are building the Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes as a way for those who click on a Chris Crutcher link to understand more about this particular novel. Mr. Dolomite I am happy to discuss this with you. - Prof. Kenny Fasching-Varner.  We meet on Tuesday's and Thursdays form 6:00 to 10:00 (which if youl ook on class schedules for the Summer under GRDG - Graduate Reading in the class schedules link on academics half way down the page or so that I am do teach and our class Developing LIteracy through Literature is a real class and we are really writing the content for this page.  Please do not ruin our use of technology.  Here is a direct link to the schedules and my class is GRDG 652 so you can see it yourself... Course Schedule  --Litclass 04:11, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Um. Great. WIkipedia is still not free hosting. Alphachimp talk 04:18, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Initial comments without section

message: I added a "Fact Tag" to the article indicating that it needs a citation from a verifiable source to document the controversy around the book. If the Litclass class project can provide a cite for this it will almost certainly save the article from deletion. Good luck :) --Doc Tropics Message in a bottle 22:32, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation needed

message: It's not perfect, but it's sourced and it's more encyclopedic in tone.  It still needs work, either way, but I can't do much else where I'm sitting at this very moment.  Sorry if there were students working on this. --badlydrawnjeff talk 12:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complete rewrite 

message: Old versions, still visible in the page history, e.g. this one, had material on characters and plot. The old material was far too detailed and not well supported by source citations. But it could be appropriate to say some things about a few major characters and major plot elements. What would be best would be to support these statements by actual quotations, using page numbers. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See, I think I have the book at home, but I'm not sure.  I'm not against a plot summary, but I'm simply sure I'm not the person to write it, I'm horrible at them. --badlydrawnjeff talk 13:59, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't expecting you to do it... my comments was more for the benefit of 149.69.82.242, who added the character and plot material and might be bothered by its having been removed. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  My $0.02 on further expansion

message: I tagged the plot paragraph for section cleanup and the tag was removed (and then readded). I figured that I would explain my reasoning here. The paragraph is extremely long and somewhat rambling. At the time I tagged it had what anyone could call excessive overlinking. It had one POV statement, at the end of the paragraph, which was followed by an exclamation point. I think the whole paragraph would be better replaced by several sentences. By the way, this is an example of an article of a bestselling book. Note the very short plot description. Comments? αChimp laudare 12:31, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with everything in the above paragraph. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:45, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup Section 

message: A sentence like
:Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes is a story of hope, fear, identity, salvation, and life!
cannot go in as a simple opinion, supported only by the editor's authority... as the concept of "editor's authority" does not apply to Wikipedia. All this is explained in the verifiability policy, which is linked under every edit box and is important for editors to understand. 
On the other hand, we can and should have properly sourced facts about opinions. 
In other words, if a reviewer writing in a publication had said this, or something like it, then it could go in, in the form
:::Reviewer X called Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes "a story of hope, fear, identity, salvation, and life"
then it would probably be appropriate for the article. It should be accompanied by a citation showing where and when the review appeared... one good enough to allow someone to verify the citation if they wanted to. And it ought to be a fairly "real" publication, not, say, someone's personal blog or website. 
In the case of a controversial opinion, you should be braced for the possibility that other editors might want to add source citations for other opinions. Nothing like this is at issue here...yet... but I thought I'd mention it, as I suspect it's quite possible conservative Christian publication somewhere might have taken notice of this book and said unkind things about it. If there are conflicting, reasonably widely-held bodies of opinion, the neutrality principle says all should be represented. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:01, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The right way to include content about opinions 

message: It doesn't seem as if this could be unintentional. If there are any good, citable source statements in which Crutcher or anyone else says anything about this it would be nice to have it in the article, as I'm sure I'm not the only person curious about it. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:03, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Byrnes" is a homophone for "Burns"