Collab: Good writing

Bop1996

Bop1996

Power Star
Retired Wiki Staff
A while back, the wiki admins created a page called MarioWiki:Good Writing to give examples of bad writing. This page goes into great detail on what kinds of bad writing plague our wiki and how we can fix it. This collab thread is designed to bring more pages in line with this policy, since an alarming amount of articles are just poorly written.

Here are some examples of bad writing, with some links to show how they were rewritten:

*MarioWiki:BJAODN/Tabuu to this
*MarioWiki:BJAODN/Shadow Queen to this
*This to this
*All the pages here (MarioWiki:BJAODN/Luigi's Mansion) to their respective rewritten versions (too many to go find right now)

As of right now, we have some pages that have yet to be cleaned, but have been identified as horribly written:
*Princess Peach - I've already begun work on this, so I'll finish it soon.
*The plot summaries for the three Mario & Luigi games. These are overloaded with cruft in the form of every meaninglessly tiny detail about every single plot element ever. I've said I would do these too, but if someone else would like to work on them, feel free.
*A lot of our PiT articles in general are just really poorly written and could use a good cleaning. Unclaimed.
*Paper Mario's plot summary is ridiculously detailed as well. Unclaimed.
*A good deal of our level articles have bad walkthrough-style writing. Several people have already said they'd help. Also it's worth noting that with the creation of many new Paper Mario: Sticker Star and New Super Mario Bros. U level articles, plenty of those will be created with poor writing, so those should be nipped in the bud before they get left undone for long.

This collab has already rewritten:
*Baby Luigi's PiT section. (old revision) - Done by BabyLuigiOnFire
*DKC2's story section. (old revision) - Glowsquid did this
*Fawful's Personality section. (old revision) - BLOF
*Dimentio's General Information section. (old revision) - BLOF
 
There were a few things I'd change, so I'll run through it and fix them at some point later. But overall, you did a really good job with it. It looks much better now.
 
I took a stab at rewritting the DKC 2 plot summary, though writting about the post-game portion was pretty awkward. If anyone can make it flow better, that'd be appreciated.



I suggested adding the Dimentio page to the Op.
 
Well, they're horribly written in almost every way. The Luigi's Mansion sections contain massive piles of information irrelevant to their respective subjects, and that poorly written. The Tabuu page was ~30000 characters of plot information on a character that only appears in one cutscene at the end of the game, and then ~2000 characters describing his "personality" in way more detail than necessary. Same goes for the Shadow Queen.

Glowsquid said:
I took a stab at rewritting the DKC 2 plot summary, though writting about the post-game portion was pretty awkward. If anyone can make it flow better, that'd be appreciated.



I suggested adding the Dimentio page to the Op.
Click to expand...
I'll look over the DKC2 summary sometime, but it looks much much better than it did.

Yeah, the Dimentio page is definitely worth adding, especially that Personality section.
 
Please add Fawful. The personality section is definitely worth looking at.
 
"If we're going to compete with MarioWiki, what the Mariopedia really needs is for us to preface every statement with "It is interesting to note that..." - Someone on TheMushroomKingdom

He's right. Statements like "It is interesting to note", "It should be noted", or things like that are just plain awful. They add no meaning at all to the article and instead just detract from any sort of encyclopedic value an article has. If you see these, get rid of them on-sight.
 
The grammar book The Elements of Style even pans those phrases, "It should be noted..." and other crap like that. So yeah, it is highly unprofessional and nonstandard. Instead of announcing that the phrase you'll say is important, make it so

"Importantly" is just as bad as those phrases. Just a heads up.

Ctrl+F those and obliterate them.