Talk:Gu Jiegang/GA1

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Nominator: Generalissima (talk · contribs) 04:21, 13 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Premeditated Chaos (talk · contribs) 22:22, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take this. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:22, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Blah blah you know how I review so I'll get on with it.

• "where he continued folklore studies" - "where he continued to study folklore" reads a little more naturally imo
• "outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War" suggest dating this
• "but was forced to condemn ... he was appointed to head..." dates for these also?'
• Book of Documents is italicized in its own article, why not here?
• "ultimately descended" I don't think ultimately is doing much for you here
• "would later attribute" WP:WOULDCHUCK - I know this is an essay but "later attributed" works just as well and cuts the extra word
• This is basically a style nitpick, but it reads a bit repetitively to start a sentence with "As Gu" then semicolon it to "as an expert"
• Do we know why the grandfather preferred X classic to Y classic? I assume it's because the latter two were part of the Big 5 Confucian texts but maybe that should be explicit?
• "Gu profusely read the essays of the political theorist Liang Qichao." idk if profusely is adding much value here.
• "The dictatorship of Yuan Shikai" I might contextualize this somewhat as we've gone from a socialist revolution to some dictator guy quite rapidly
• "lost focus in coursework" feels awkward. "lost his focus on" or "lost focus on his" maybe? Or even a wholesale revision? Something like "ignored his coursework in favour of attending Peking opera" might be kind of fun
• "However, Gu was unimpressed" I think you can ditch the however without losing much
• "Wang Guowei was another major influence" this may or may not be in the sourcing, but do we know why? like, "because of his focus on X" or "because of opinion Y"?
• "He was very inspired" "very" isn't doing much here
• "lured his conservative roommate Fu Sinan into attending his lectures" 😂 although I'm curious if it worked
• Since we just named Fu Sinan, do we need to repeat the whole name in the next sentence?
• "initially intended" using "initially" here implies that its aims eventually became something different, if so, what?
• "in the Peking University" is there a missing word here like "journal" or something?
• "these were published in an October 1920 column in Beijing Morning Post" - was this one single publication on one single day in October 1920, or like, for all of October 1920 he had a regular recurring column?
• "variety of historiographical texts. He read critiques " you could probably smooth this into one sentence with something like "including critiques"
• "return again to Suzhou in mourning for" - "to mourn for" maybe, or even "forced to return to Suzhou again following the death of his grandmother"... right now it's just slightly novelesque
• "on the creation of Chinese historical tropes" I feel like this needs a little more explanation/context
• "Qing" or "Qin"? You seem to use both
• "which were later manipulated to adhere to Confucian principles beginning in the Qin and Han periods" I think you can ditch either "later" or "beginning", possibly even both, unless the manipulation continued beyond the Qin and Han periods.
• "had previously dismissed" we already know this was previously since it's past tense. Also I don't know that Youwei needs to be sequestered in parentheses
• "Gu later compiled" similarly, we know this must be later, since he couldn't have done it before he got these letters, and we're going to get the publication date in a minute also