Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Liber Eliensis/archive1

Imzadi1979 prose comments

"The southern works, including the Liber Eliensis, are mainly concerned with the various controversies that their religious houses were involved in." I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about recasting the sentence so that it doesn't have a dangling preposition.

I can't honestly think of a way of phrasing it that isn't terribly contrived sounding. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:12, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"The southern works, including the Liber Eliensis, are mainly concerned with the various controversies in which their religious houses were involved." How's that? Imzadi 1979 → 18:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The thing is, that reads stilted to me. I've never understood the great horror of the "dangling preposition" or whatever. Let me ping Malleus on this one, I really am working hard to pare down my wordiness, and I think the suggestion just sounds wordier. Ealdgyth - Talk 18:36, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How about "The southern works, including the Liber Eliensis, are mainly concerned with various controversies involving their religious houses."--J3Mrs (talk) 18:54, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'll defer to whatever is decided, but my first impulse in reading that sentence was that the dangling preposition stuck out like a sour note in the middle of an otherwise lovely symphony. As for J3Mrs' suggestion, I think that it needs a "respective" as in "their respective religious houses" to clarify that the houses "owned" the works and not the other way around. Imzadi 1979 → 19:00, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"The northern histories are less concerned with controversy, and overall are more prone to hagiography." A wikilink to hagiography might be nice for us non-historians.

"The work describes the area around the abbey for 20 or 30 miles as being filled with unburied corpses and that the price of a bushel of grain rose to 200 pence." A conversion for the distance might be nice, but I don't expect one for the volume quantity because of the variance in definitions of the unit. Thoughts?

I"ve added the distance conversion but didn't on the bushel, because the time frame definitely predates the usage of imperial bushels.... it's unclear if we know whether an exact dimension was used here as well as .. what do you convert it TO? Ealdgyth - Talk 18:12, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's exactly what I was thinking as well. Imzadi 1979 → 18:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"The E manuscript dates from the late 12th century, and shows three different scribal hands. The F manuscript dates to the early 13th century, with four scribal hands." Should the wikilink be shifted to the first mention of "scribal hands" instead of the second?

Two quick comments above, but I seriously liked the article. Imzadi 1979 → 18:28, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]