Talk:Comparative law and justice/Guatemala

Mid-Semester Comments:

You are off to a good start! You've got lots of content up, and a couple of good images. I do have a bunch of comments--some about the writing and some about the content. These comments are meant to help you revise and improve going forward so that the final Wiki will be fantastic, so use them as a guide for where to go next.

Some Comments on the Content Your brief history is fine--but perhaps too brief. You might want to say a bit more about how it became independent; you also might want to talk more about the civil war or at least link to another source of information (see http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Links for help on making links), as your reader might not be too familiar with this episode of Guatemalan history.

Your section on elections would benefit from returning to our discussion of elections (you can find the info on the PowerPoint or in the assigned reading) to explain what type of elections Guatemala uses. As you know, you have not completed the section on judicial review; your page also does not mention whether trials are adversarial or inquisitorial.

Some Comments on the Writing Your biggest hurdle in writing, I think, is in being a bit too wordy. You write "in which rest" instead of "inhabited by" or "it was brought here" rather than "brought" or "has been known to be" rather than "is". Try to use fewer commas as well. The way to think about comma usage is to read your text out loud and only use commas where your speech naturally pauses between phrases or ideas.

When talking about geography, use north-south-east-west rather than beneath-on top of-next to (so your first sentence should say "south of Mexico."

Try to break up your writing into more paragraphs. This is especially important when writing for the Web, as the eye kind of glazes over when confronted with a huge unbroken block of text. For instance, you might break your first paragraph into two: one on geography and one on the people of Guatemala. Then move the part about life expectancy and health into the "economic development, health, and education" section. The crime section could also be broken up: one paragraph on crime rates and another on public opinion.

It's often easier to read lists of numbers if you put them in a table (or at least use a bullet list). But if you don't want to use the crime rate table, remove the code for it from your page.

Always proofread--the best way is to say it out loud and listen for things that sound a little wrong. There are a couple of spelling errors. If you use Firefox, it has a built-in spell checker which can solve this problem for you!

Note that geocities pages are not the best source of info--try if you can to stick with the recommended sources on the assignment, though I know sometimes you must go beyond them. And as I am telling almost everyone, you do need to work on your citations to get them in line with common citation formats.

Keep up the good work--you're finding lots of great content, you just need to be sure to flesh it out in terms of what we discuss in class and to make sure you're attentive to good writing and to the intricacies of online presentation.

Mlarthur 23:45, 21 October 2009 (UTC)