When reading a trope's description or working on a work's page, sometimes one may think of an example that fits so perfectly
and seems so obvious that it doesn't seem all too necessary to explain how it fits; the editor can just provide the name of the work/character (or trope) and quickly move on to something else. Short, sweet, and clever, right?
WRONG!
Providing only the name of a work/character or the name of a trope does absolutely nothing to actually explain the example. Remember, examples are supposed to explain
how (or
why) a trope is used and provide a rough idea of
where within the work itself the trope appears. Citing only the name of a work/character or trope doesn't do that
note Unless the trope is a convention involving the names of works or characters, like Alliterative Title and Alliterative Name, but these kinds of tropes are still a clear minority; after all,
there are a lot of people who aren't familiar with the work/character and
who don't understand the trope.
Thanks in no small part to
Word Cruft, there are many ways these citations can commonly occur:
- "[Name]"
- "[Name]"
- "[Name]. Just... [Name]"
- "[Name]. And HOW!" note "How?" indeed.
- "[Name] loves this trope."
- "[Name] is this trope." ("trope incarnate", etc.)
- "[Name] is the biggest offender."
- "[Name]. Self-explanatory."
- "[Character] from [Title of Work]."
This is by no means limited to trope pages, however, and can also show up on work pages, with "[Name]" often be replaced with "[Trope]" in this regard. This may, in fact, be even more common on work pages because many that add examples there automatically assume that anyone who reads it must already know everything there is to know about the work in question and so don't bother putting in any amount of detail.
There are also a few varieties that can be sufficient explanation in rare cases, but are considered bad style just the same:
- "[Trope]: [short line of dialogue]" (Quoting dialogue usually only helps those who've already seen the work; it's meaningless to everyone else.)
- "[Trope]: The Trope Namer (Trope Codifier, etc)." (It's okay to mention a Trope Namer on its own merits or on a Trivia page; just remember it doesn't explain an example.)
- A variation that is endemic to work pages is to only provide a trope link on the work page and leaving the explanation of the trope being used in the work on the trope page, in a way both fully writing out an example description while still creating a Zero Context Example all the same. Don't do this. Examples should be listed on both pages, and it saves the reader the extra trouble.
Any trope examples found on a page that fit the description for a
Zero Context Example should either be moved to that page's discussion space, or, if this represents a much bigger problem throughout an entire page, brought to attention in
this Special Efforts thread
dedicated to fixing these issues.
Compare
Weblinks Are Not Examples and
Type Labels Are Not Examples for slight variations on this premise.
See also
Two Words: Obvious Trope and
Not Self Explanatory for other faux-pas.
For the image equivalent, see
Just a Face and a Caption.
To learn more about what you
should do, instead, see
How to Write an Example.
