TortugaEnojada

Topics

• Hero - This page is completely disorganized and lacks "virtually any coherence"

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - There is no mention on this page of Harriet Jacobs' use of the Cult of True Womanhood as a means of appealing to white, female abolitionists

List of Contributions

on Hero

• I would like to reorganize this page, if I ever have the time. However, for the purposes of the ENG 235 assignment, I will likely stick only to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• For starters, this article says nothing about the purpose of this work. This will be the main piece of the article that I will add. I'll start with what we learned in class (Jacobs's use of the Cult of True Womanhood), making sure to find citations. I will then do a bit of exploring to see what other purposes Harriet Jacobs may have had in writing the narrative.
• I will fix the historical context section by rewording it and including information from the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Currently, this section matches part of Amazon's description of the narrative word for word, though whether it's plagiarism on the part of a Wikipedia editor or Amazon is unclear. I will find references to back up the claim that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl relates closely in theme to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
• In addition to the lack of any link to the Cult of True Womanhood, there also seem to be other missing hyperlinks to related topics, most notably the Civil War. Though these would be minor additions, they're still very important.
• Several statements in this article lack any sort of citations and serve no purpose other than speculation. In the "Critical response" section, for example, an editor writes, "Harriet Jacobs's work is now received as a great slave narrative that helped people to understand slavery in a new way. Before the book came out there had never been a book that talked about the sexualization of women in slavery." The first sentence is extremely abstract (a "new way"? What new way?), while the second -- which might be true -- provides no basis for the claim. There are a few other statements which are similarly flawed.
• Other statements in the article are entirely opinionated, leaving no way to verify them. In the opening paragraph, someone wrote that part of Jones's purpose was to show how the struggles of women in slavery "were harsher than what men suffered as slaves." There is no way to quantify this, thus no way to verify it. Again, there are a few other statements that seem to be the vestiges of an earlier edit which took out a large chunk of opinionated writing.
• Finally, a good deal of the article is simply not written very well. There are a couple spelling errors and plenty of awkward sentences which I would like to fix and reword.
• I may also see if I can hunt down an image or two to add, but this does not seem quite as important.

Summary

The current progress of my edits on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl can be viewed in my sandbox; this page will continue to change as I make more contributions to the article. It is unlikely that I will contribute to the "Hero" page at all, but I am still entertaining the thought if I a.) Satisfactorily complete my work on Incidents, and b.) I feel I need to contribute more to Wikipedia to meet the requirements of the assignment.

I started off with a couple simple things, adding links to the articles on Jean Fagan Yellin and the Civil War. As I contemplated how to go about adding a section on the purpose of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I noticed a few issues with the "Critical response" section, namely a lack of citations. I added information from the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and also reworded the section so that it made sense. I then split the historical context section into two subsections: "Abolitionist works" and "Slavery and the Civil War." Before, this section moved off on a bit of a tangent in discussing Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I contextualized that information and added a reference. I edited the plot summary, deleting pieces of analysis (thus making it strictly a summary) and adding hyperlinks to the various locations (such as Boston, Washington, D.C., etc.) mentioned within. I added a section on the purpose of the work, briefly explaining the Cult of True Womanhood and how Harriet Jacobs challenges this set of ideals. I then rewrote the opening section to be more consistent with other articles on Wikipedia (specifically the one on Harriet Jacobs herself).

The purpose section I created currently only contains a purpose related to what we learned about in ENG 235, and this will be the main area of contribution from here on out. I will broaden my search to sift through articles on the arguments put forth by Jacobs's narrative. TortugaEnojada (talk) 04:46, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Excellent work here, TortugaEnojada. I know you were concerned that these edits might not meet the "substantial contribution" requirements for this assignment, but hopefully you see now that they will. I'm not convinced that "purposes" is the right way to title the information on the Cult of True Womanhood. Perhaps "Cult of True Womanhood" would work better, or adding that as a subsection title under "Historical Context," since True Womanhood is part of the historical contact of the work, or as a subsection under Critical response. If you don't hear from any other users (based on your Article Talk contribution) and still need help with soured, let me know. Nadinecross78 (talk) 22:37, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

Peer Feedback

• Appearance: The appearance of your user talk page is very well organized. You have a very clear idea of how to edit and potentially improve the page you are working on.
• Neutrality: You are adding to this article some neutral ideas. You said "Other statements in the article are entirely opinionated, leaving no way to verify them." and you are going to fix them. You have not mentioned any biased opinions in your contributions.
• Notability: Your edits meet the guidelines because you are adding citations and making the article less opinionated. You are also planning on fixing the grammatical and spelling errors.
• Redundancy: There appear to be no issues of redundancy with this article.
• Relevance: This is a work that we studied in class making it relevant.
• Focus: You have a very clear idea of what you would like to do with this article.
• Overall: I think you have picked a great topic and I do not think you will have any trouble editing.

Awest-ENG235 (talk) 01:42, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Instructor Comments

All of these topics look promising, TortugaEnojada. I feel that gothic fiction might be too big a project to take on for this class, since we aren't covering it extensively. However, if you are willing to do the research, and to clearly delimit the scope of your contributions to what you feel is manageable, I'm sure you could make it work. The same thing goes for hero, but it obviously needs a ton of work. The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl might work extremely well as a topic. I'm looking forward to hearing what you decide. Nadinecross78 (talk) 02:53, 6 October 2014 (UTC)