Talk:Avon Calling

I did test edits to see if I could reduce the amount of excerpts quoted. My biggest fear is that I removed some of the commentary about the art which is needed to help illustrate how fans reacted to the art (we have very few examples of fanzine art discussions). Another problem is that by only including the first section of each review, the same stories get highlighted which is not fair to all the other stories. And last, the formatting I used show what has been snipped in the midsection seems to vanish. In other words, input welcomed.--MeeDee (talk) 02:19, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree about comments about art -- there aren't enough of them, and when I find them, I'm ecstatic. There's no way I want to give them a short shrift.

I also agree that including only the first bit of the review isn't fair to the other stories as fans who comment on a whole zine tend to start at the beginning of the contents and work their way down. Not only do these excerpts exclude the middle, but zine often left their longest (and sometimes flagship story) at the end. One of the problems is when a fan reviews a whole zine and wants to give attention to each contribution, that even just a single sentence about each fanwork makes the review very long.

One solution would be to make some highly judgmental decisions about which parts of the review to include further down the line. I don't like being the one to pick and choose which stories to highlight on Fanlore; I prefer to let the reviewer speak for her/himself. Which brings me to another point: the style of the review as well as the substance is really important. How the fan chooses to express her/himself as a whole is really interesting in terms of language, terms, things the fan chooses to accentuate. I find it wonderfully fascinating (and I think others do as well) about the differences in the comments fans make in different fandoms and at different "eras." The comments/reviews/LoCs for fandoms highlight what was going on in that fandom at the time, as well as what was going on at that point in history. I hate to lose any of it. If I had more time and energy right now, I'd make a separate page for each of these stories and put the short blurb on there, citing the source as always.

As per the formatting problem, it's not clear to me what that is. Sorry! --Mrs. Potato Head (talk) 14:51, 17 January 2013 (UTC)