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@Noswall59:. You were kind enough to invite my comments on the article following your work on it. I haven't much to offer: the prose is a pleasure to read, the structure and balance of the article are sensible, and the citations are wide-ranging and thorough. I raised an eyebrow at your practice of putting given names before surnames in your citations, but I suppose there's no one right way of going about such things.
The prose, though good, is something of an unrelieved slab. Could you perhaps find some relevant pictures to break it up? If one is honest, half the pictures one adds to articles are there to relieve the monotony of type rather than to offer any real illumination of the topic. You would certainly be allowed one Fair Use copyright image of Roberts at the head of the article, and there must be some out-of-copyright photographs of Edwardian slums to be had. As to detailed comments on the prose, these are my meagre gleanings:
Blue links
You indulge heavily in WP:OVERLINKs to perfectly familiar, everyday terms including apathy, autobiography, brass, classic, cotton, curriculum, deferential, engineering, factory, French , glossary, gossip, headteacher, homosexuality, illiterate, jobless, labour, labourers, manners, manufacturing, morality, nostalgia, paperback, poverty, preface, press, radio, reader, respectability, short story, slang, slum, statistics, superstitions and Sweden. There are more, but I gave up after 35. I really urge you to take a pruning knife to the whole article and get rid of the otiose links, which are no help to the reader and are rather a distraction and irritant.
Early life (1905–19)
The current Diktat from the Manual of Style is that date ranges must be written out in full – so 1905–1919. (I know! But there it is. The MoS and common sense don't always coincide.)
the family shop on Waterloo Street – a lost battle, I fear, but all the same it would be nice to stick to the traditional English "in" rather than give in to the Americanism "on" So-and-so Street.
The business nearly went bankrupt in 1911 – do businesses go bankrupt? I thought it was people who did that, but I may be quite wrong.
Apprenticeship and unemployment (1919–29)
Roberts' apprenticeship – I notice you use both the BrE and AmE forms for the possessive of names ending in s. In my view Roberts's is preferable to Roberts' because it reflects how the word is pronounced. But whichever you prefer, you should stick to one or the other.
consisted of him repeating – a pedant (e.g. me) might ask for "his" rather than "him" here, to go with the gerund.
Teaching, farm work, writing and later life (1929–74)
He also married, in 1935, to Ruth Dean – this reads rather oddly. Does one marry to someone?
The Classic Slum (1971)
Widely acclaimed on its release, Marghanita Laski in The Times – I think you mean the book, rather than Miss Laski, was acclaimed, but that isn't what the sentence says
Reviewing the book for The Daily Telegraph, Michael Kennedy … – This is certainly Michael Kennedy, who was Northern Editor of the Telegraph as well as one of our best music critics.
That's my lot. Nothing to cause alarm and despondency there, I feel, apart from the epidemic of WP:OVERLINK. This is a fine article, and I have enjoyed reviewing it. It seems to me of GA standard, if you are interested in pursuing such things. Tim riley talk15:26, 25 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much Tim – insightful comments and some excellent catches there. I believe I have addressed all of them – the article is in much better shape for it. I intend to take this to FAC soon. Thank you once more; please feel free to ping me if you would like anything of yours reviewing. —Noswall59 (talk) 10:06, 26 May 2021 (UTC).[reply]
I generally steer clear of FAC these days, for reasons I shan't bore you with, but I'll happily make an exception in this case. Please ping me when you nominate the article. Tim riley talk15:15, 26 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
