Hello, MelaniePS! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! -- Irn (talk) 20:12, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, Melanie - I'm writing with regard to your recent edits to the article on Carl Sagan. I just want to say that I disagree with almost all of them, but I thought I'd give you a chance to discuss them rather than just undoing them.
Regarding the trip as a boy to the American Museum of Natural History, you changed ", and" to "as well as". I think "and" is more concise. While I believe you may have changed "and" to "as well as" to avoid confusion due to the presence of "and" twice in the sentence, I think the comma before the first "and" is sufficient to distinguish the two items: "meteorites" and "dinosaurs and other animals....". Also, "as well as" adds two more unnecessary words and interrupts the flow of the sentence.
Regarding Sagan's age at the time of the trip to the World's Fair, you changed "At about age six or seven" to "Around age six or seven". While it is true that "around" is one word and "at about" is two, and thus "around" could be said to be more concise, I believe "around" is more often used with one age, as in "around age six". "At about" sounds fine with the two ages ("six or seven").
Regarding the prepositional phrase at the beginning of a sentence, "Soon after entering elementary school....", you added a comma after "school" and called it a typo. A comma after an initial adverbial clause (such as "Soon after he began school,...." is required. A comma is not required after an initial prepositional phrase; it is optional. Here, I do not think a comma is necessary. A comma unnecessarily slows down the flow of the sentence.
Well, that's my opinion. I'll leave it as it is. It's not that important, and your changes are certainly not grammatically incorrect. These are stylistic judgments. Cheers! – CorinneSD (talk) 19:32, 27 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
