Hey just wanted to say that last one was my bad. I went to go look up where it was in Tricks of the Mind and realized the essay I was basing my edit off of was actually in Brown's Pure Effect. Thanks for correcting me, apologies for wasting your time. If I did want to edit that lead paragraph, to emphasize how claims of psychology and body language reading are often exaggerated and much more a part of the presentation than the method, how should I approach doing so? I'm sure there are some articles on this editing topic I have yet to read, any recommendations?
Xobr21037 (talk) 19:31, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Xobr21037, thanks for responding. The lead should be a summary of the body of the article. See MOS:LEAD for information about the lead. Nothing should be added to the lead unless it is already stated and sourced in the body. Also there is usually no need to add citations to the lead, since everything there should already be explained in more detail and cited in the body of the article. The relevant part of the body seems to be the Techniques section, which does already explain that "subtle verbal cues, an acute sensitivity to body language, etc." are offered as explanations of mentalism, but that the actual explanation is often "classic magicians' trickery". This seems to be already summarized by the lead which says "ordinary conjuring means", natural human abilities (i.e. reading body language, refined intuition, subliminal communication, emotional intelligence), and an in-depth understanding of key principles from human psychology or other behavioral sciences. Perhaps you feel that this lead sentence puts too much emphasis on non-conjuring explanations; if so I would not object to rewriting this to place less emphasis on "psychological" explanations. However, in my opinion, the article is more in need of citations for the Techniques section, which has some unsourced and weakly sourced claims. It would be especially useful to have more sources to support the Principle section's claim that magician's trickery is the basis for most mentalism techniques. Currently that is cited to a guidebook which AFAICT describes some useful mentalism techniques but is not an overview of how all mentalists operate. I hope this helps. CodeTalker (talk) 17:33, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, I realized that you left a message on my talk page about the different kinds of English, the reason why I corrected it is because my browser believed that it was a typo, and I was tasked of copyediting and I was just following the directions, are there ways to tell if it is British English or a typo? GimmeKittens (talk) 17:18, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The simplest way would be to look up the word in a dictionary, such as this. However, in your edit summary you said "browsers don't really like British English in their autocorrection software" so it seems that you had already recognized that it was British English and not a typo. CodeTalker (talk) 17:28, 30 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Brickynoid, thanks for asking for clarification. On S. S. Balan there were two errors: first you changed "he reportedly framed" to "he report and displaedly framed", which I guess was some kind of typo since it makes no sense and "displaedly" is not even a word. Second, you added a space after "during the 1970s." between the period and the reference. According to MOS:REFPUNCT, the reference should follow the punctuation with no intervening space.On Jelena Đurović, you introduced a minor grammatical error: we normally say that someone serves on a board, not in a board. So it was correct before your change.I hope this helps. Feel free to ask if you have any further questions. CodeTalker (talk) 01:42, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh ok. For “he reportedly framed, I changed it to he framed. But then Grammarly bugged out and made the text he report and displaedly. I remember correcting this mistake though when editing though. That’s strange. Well thanks for letting me know. Brickynoid (talk) 01:45, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
