Talk:Sailing Alone Around the World

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[edit] 2 changes

I've made two changed to the article:

1) Moved the literary genre of travel literature from the "see also" into the main body of the text. It is common and well established on many articles on Wikipedia to mention the genre or type of work in question in the first sentence and not just say it is a "book", but rather a "mystery novel" or some literary genre like that. Travel literature is more specific and more precise than just "book". Other examples on Wikipedia available on request.

2) Moved the date into a parenthesis at the end of the title- this is more professional and how it is usually done in professional encyclopedias. Saying "was a book written in 1900" is wordy and again, not as clean and professional as it could be.

-- Stbalbach 21:46, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Firstly, it's not "travel literature". If you'd read the book, you'd know that. Joshua Slocum was not a tourist off to visit the Maoris. If Magellan had written a book after circumnavigating the globe, would you have have classified it as "travel literature"? If Peary, back from the North Pole, had written a book (he did, in fact), would you have tossed it in with Liz Smeadley's breathless account of seeing the canals of Venice and classified it as "travel literature"? As a sop to the ignorant, I can see having "travel literature" as a "see also" suggestion, but insisting on this misplaced characterisation in the lead is absurd. If it's so important to characterise the book, don't you think the title ("Sailng Alone Around the World") and the remainder of the sentence (which explains the subject matter and context of the book) do that adequately?

Secondly, ... "1900" in parentheses is "clean and professional", but a straightforward English-language declarative sentence is, by inference, "wordy"? That's six words, only six words. Is that wordy? Only to you, I'd wager. Besides, putting the date in some kind of context resolves the ambiguity of whether the date refers to when the book was written/published or when Slocum made his voyage.

Sometimes I think Wikipedia's greatest shortcoming is that they let anybody, no matter who, touch the product. You waste my time. PeterHuntington 23:29, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

--

Travel literature is a literary genre studied in the academic world. There are entire encyclopedias on travel literature, people get PhD's in travel literature and there are academic journals on the subject. Slocum's account (which I have read) is part of that genre. It may also be called outdoor literature, which is how its categorized here on Wikipedia, a sub-genre of travel literature (with other names as well) - but "travel literature" is the most common and catch-all term. BTW I wrote most of the current travel literature and outdoor literature articles (which still need a lot of work) and am pretty well read on the subject. I realize that perhaps popular conception of what "travel literature" means may not match up with the academic world, but this is an encyclopedia, we use academic sources and methods. Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia lists Sailing Alone Around the World on page 263, volume 1.

As for the 1900, there is no ambiguity because the article is about a book, this is clear from the first line of the sentence. Again, this is just how its normally done, list the work with the date in parens right after it.

Any other comments? -- Stbalbach 12:58, 26 April 2007 (UTC)