h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Morning Hypoman, first off thanks for the link, I didn't even know it existed. Secondly and more to the point, I bugged Vegiman into giving a review of a page I've done, I actually want it to be right before it gets submitted, and he also suggested that I bug you. Aparantly he thinks you're good at this review business. I have to admit I haven't read any of your reviews yet. I would be grateful however and will work on a link for you anyway.

No worries at all, Pastey!

I noticed the recommendation (it's amazing what a search for your own name will bring up!) and have already copied the article down so that I can take it home and have a look. First impressions suggest that it could easily be chopped into two, or maybe even three pieces (the history of ale, real ale, and that group you mention but which I've momentarily forgotten the name of), but I'll get back to you at the soonest possible convenience - hopefully tomorrow - and tell you more if I can.

Regards,

H.

Thanks.

OK Pastey, I have to keep this succinct, for three reasons: (1) I'm at work and work time is (ideally) to be spent doing work (I tried taking the article home last night, but had some trouble unpacking my computer to read it: I think I'm safer trying to do these things at work!). (2) I've tried to type your name 3 times this morning and come up with three very different variations on the word "Pastey" which bear no direct relation to that word: I'm in poor typing form, in other words. (3) The shorter and sweeter it is, the easier it will be to understand what I have to say. This means that I'll only give minimal examples for most points. Remember, also, that I am currently riding high on the wave of good publicity that Vegiman has given me, and my critique could become a little cocky as a result. If I say something about your article which is genuinely hurtful or stupid, please let me know what, and tell me to stop!

The first point I should raise about this article, as forecast in the earlier note I sent you, concerns its syntactic structure. It's a good, well-researched and well written article, but at the moment it appears to be about several different things, and the whole subject is treated over such length that it's easy to get the things confused.

The main subjects you cover are the history of ale, the Campaign for Real Ale, and the composition and makeup of ale. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA - in one of the most glorious acronyms I have seen this year!) is probably a separate subject: more a political statement than a note on ale itself! If you mentioned CAMRA in the text and referred people to a separate article about it (with, of course, a separate cross-reference), you would achieve two things: one, you would be able to concentrate on the subject of this article, which according to the title is Real Ale. Two, the article would become shorter, easier to read, and because of these things, funnier. The other advantage is that you would actually be able to say MORE about CAMRA in a separate article than you can afford to say here. The two bits of the article on either side of the bit about CAMRA can be joined with minimal editing, and CAMRA can probably be transplanted without addition into a separate article, if that should take your fancy.

The other points I should raise are largely issues of style and fluency. Some of the sentences here are a little confusing. For example, this two-sentence phrase: "The word Brewster, meaning a woman brewer came into the English language after Brewer, meaning a man who brews however, because for a man it was a separate job. But for a woman it was part of the housework." - is a little hard to understand because of that stray "however" in the middle of it. It is also not clear to me that this part of the sentence 'fits' here, because you've already pointed out that women did most of the brewing. Under this scheme of things, men who brewed would probably do so as specialists, so "brewer" would be the name of an employment, rather than a simple description. The phrase also confuses because of the use of "But" to start the second sentence: it's not actually necessary here. In addition, to be complete the sentence would need some extra punctuation and a bit of subject clarification so that separate sentences were fully functional on their own. To give you an idea of what I'm saying, this would be my rewrite of this phrase: "The word Brewster - meaning a woman brewer - came into the English language after Brewer, meaning a man who brews: because for a man it was a distinct and specialist job. For a woman brewing was part of the housework." Brackets and other parentheses are good things in these sorts of written situations!

There are several such problems in the article, but I'm sure that you could figure out some of these things which you could change when you re-read the article. More careful punctuation and stylistic nuances can make the article easier to read, as well as more meaningful, and more stylish. Another stylistic consideration is the way you address the reader personally (asking questions, personalising "you", etc.). I would recommend against this, although this is a personal preference, because it takes away from the tone of the rest of what you have to say: it can be jocular without being personal!

A grammatical criticism concerns confusion of tense and person in sentence construction. For example, in the second paragraph you write: "If anyone can actually understand that gibberish then you must have wrote it." - which is fine in itself, except that "you" and "anyone" are markedly different concepts: to make the subject of the sentence consistent, you would have to substitute "he or she" or "they" for "you", OR substitute "you" for "anyone". You would also have to make the tense of the sentence more consistent (past perfect [I THINK it's past perfect] of "write" is "have written" rather than "have wrote") - unless you actually intended this sort of confusion to happen, which does not appear to be the case, and thus probably shouldn't be anyway. One alternative for the sentence would be: "If anyone can actually understand that gibberish then they must have written it."

The last point I should make is about the physical length of the article - which is merely a function of how it's set out. You can do without the headings for each section, and compress the article in to fewer paragraphs. That way, you preserve the subject of the article: it's less diversionary from what you actually want to say Cross-references to other articles - for example that on beer would probably also be useful: search the index and see what sort of related stuff you can drag up and mention!

That's about as much as I can think of to get going with, anyway. Have another look, and see if you want to make some changes. The points about structure and separation of separate subjects - with appropriate cross-referencing - are probably the most important I have to make: the editors, if they're on their games, should take care of the rest!

Regards,

H.

Thanks, that's really helpful.