Talk:John Bratton

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BetacommandBot 05:08, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Great start on your article! Your writing is very concise which made for smooth reading. There were only a couple errors I noticed while reading your article that you should check for.

You present the information in a factual way and are unbiased so no concerns there. You obviously put a lot of time and research into your article and it shows. I found your article very interesting and detailed.

You seemed to have covered most of the main points of Bratton's life and career. However, you did not say anything about his family. Is anything known about his parents or siblings? Did he ever marry and have a family of his own? If there is any info on this, it would be a great addition.

Overall, good work and best of luck!

Ersmith9 (talk) 01:50, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Peer Review

Overall, I think this article is put together extremely well. Not only is it well written (without any significant spelling or gramatical errors), but it is engaging as well. The autor immediately hooks the reader by describing the significance and importance of General Bratton in relation to the Civil War. This is seen in the opening paragraph when the author states that Bratton was a general in the Confederate States Army and that he led troops in several important battles. I think this article also upholds fairly well to the standards of the wikipedia style guidelines. The author emphasizes headings, article titles, uses correct grammar and spelling, and also provides a picture with important highlights of General Bratton's life/career. It also seems that the author has conducted a very thorough research process. Considering that the information in this article deals with events that happened many years ago, I think it would be tough to gather information about the subject. Even though there are many references that are used to gather this information, one has to question the accuracy of them due to the time that has passed. Alot of this information has been passed through generations and might get changed depending on the resource. This brings me to my next point of bias. Information or events may be relayed differently depending on the person. This is especially true since it was so long ago. In addition to this, alot of this information is based on letters that Bratton had written to his wife. This creates a huge bias considering that it was Bratton relaying information about himself. I think one of the weaknesses of this article is the fact that the author doesnt go into more detail about his childhood and personal life. When writing about important historical figures such as John Bratton, the author should go into more detail about his childhood, family, and education. I realize that this information would be hard to find, but I think it would definitely be a good idea to include some of these aspects about Bratton's life. I have tried to find material online relating to this matter, but I have found nothing. You might want to try the online database at the library and see if you have any luck finding this type of information. Overall, I think this article presents itself in a very professional manner and covers most of the major points that it is intended to cover.Skinfan8 (talk) 02:25, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I have updated the article to fix cites and refs and straightened out some errors about which battles he fought. The sentence "Typically, captured Confederate solders were subjected to brutality and neglect as prisoners of war" needs to be cited or removed. You need to provide page numbers for the Austin citations. Hal Jespersen (talk) 15:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Overall, I think this article is superiorly crafted. Your introductory paragraph and right-hand side bar sums up John Bratton and his Civil War career in a quick and easy to digest way. The more detailed sections on Bratton are well written, detailed, and narrated in a chronological manner. The inclusion of information on Bratton before and after the war improves your article, and gives a well-rounded account of his life. You’ve used a number of reputable and unbiased sources, which is great. The way you’ve cited your references by page number also strengthens the validity of your information. You’ve also included a lot of relevant internal links, which helped me to better understand the context of the important battles and the Confederate Army. This article could be strengthened with additional information about Bratton’s life (outside of the Civil War) or additional explanation about the importance of some battles (so that readers don’t have to do further research on their own.) When you just list the battles, I was left asking, how did each battle contribute to the Union winning the war? For example, a lot of the battles Bratton fought in were inclusive, but the Battle of Chickamauga was a big Confederate victory. Linking the battles to the overall outcome of the war would be interesting. It might also be interesting to explicitly state, “John Bratton was a part of X Confederate victories…” Kasterno (talk) 15:23, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

This articles gives good information about the life of the John Bratton. The information that you provide gives us a very concise, and detailed biography of the general. The strongest aspect of your article is that you back up everything up really well. There is always specific years and dates of the major events in his life. The references are reliable because a lot of them come from book sources that are unbiased and deal with the topic of the Civil War Era. The sidebar is very informative because it lists the battles in which he participated with the appropriate links to other articles. Everything is done very well except for that my only concern is that the article is definitely centered around his time as a civil war general and perhaps you kind of focused on it too much. He was later a politician so maybe you could elaborate on that aspect of his life which would be very interesting to see his views on issues in that era. That is something you probably are already working on but I just wanted to suggest perhaps extending his non-Civil War biography. In the end, the article is very informative and looks very good. The links to articles is very good because if your talking about Bratton at the Battle at Fredericksburg you can link to learn about the battle by reading about Bratton and vice versa. It seems like you are on your way for a great article. User:fuentesc —Preceding undated comment added 16:17, 8 April 2009 (UTC).