CZ Talk:Cold Storage/Natural stress relief meditation
The justification for this article is that NSR Meditation is currently the most popular alternative to the highly effective and scientifically studied technique for stress reduction, Transcendental Meditation.
Since this article was written by the president of one of the organizations that teaches NSR Meditation, it is oriented toward those interested in learning it. This results in a certain commercial tone of voice (it may be relevant to note here that the organizations are nonprofit and charge only a small fraction of their nearest competitor, Transcendental Meditation). I believe the article could be improved by changing some wording to improve neutrality, at least so far as the tone of the article is concerned. Any help is welcome. David Spector 23:48, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
I understand that it is an alternative technique, but I urge you not to put up any article that can be interpreted as being in a commercial tone of voice. That can result in some very negative reactions.
At the very least, look at the formatting conventions of other articles. For example, headings are not bolded strings, but lines delimited with an appropriate number of = signs (e.g., ==Related methods==)
The first sentence should repeat the article title, perhaps with slight grammatical tweaking, and give a succinct definition.
I would note that this article probably belongs with health sciences and possibly healing arts as well as psychology, but I would urge you to rephrase it so there is no question of it being misinterpreted as advertising. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:20, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Howard, Thank you so much for your helpful comments. I have edited the article to conform to the formatting conventions. I have also added a concise definition at the start of the article. I would like to add this article to the other groups or topic areas that you mention, but I have not been able to find instructions for doing this. Perhaps you could give me some specific instructions or a reference to the proper Help page.
The biggest problem is clearly whether the article can be misinterpreted as advertising. Since NSR has been so well received by the general public as an affordable alternative to TM, it deserves to be described in online encyclopedias. But I have no wish to advertise in encyclopedias, as advertising and publicity are much better done elsewhere.
I've changed one heading from "how to learn" to "how is NSR learned", which I think helps, but I don't think it is enough.
As president of NSR/USA, it is difficult for me to describe NSR Meditation in an unbiased way. Therefore, I really need your further and more detailed help (and that of other editors) to guide me in improving this article. David Spector 16:20, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
- Sorry, but it really does read like advertising. As a starting point, you should think of this as the sort of thing that would be appropriately written for a scientific journal, although here, we would want either to include definitions, or links to definitions, that the general reader might not follow.
- I can't always find the right help page myself. :-( Not that it's quite the same sort of subject, look at chiropractic and acupuncture as something that might give an example of style. There may be some useful terminology in National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. We don't have a general article on relaxation techniques, which would be a good "top-level" article to review, neutrally, the various techniques and underlying therapies. It might be a challenge, but if you could, for example, also write an article on TM that a TM practitioner would consider accurate (although not an endorsement), you'd be getting a good sense of the CZ approach to life and the uniers. :-) Howard C. Berkowitz 16:33, 9 December 2008 (UTC)