Essie's Critiques

The End of the World Where My Dreams Begin | shefriendofstars

BLURB:

I read a brilliant quote once. The thing we must discuss more is the hunger not love. There are a lot of topics for us to write, but most of us write about teen fiction, love and magic. So I tried something different. You won't find fairy tale love stories in my collection. I invite you all to read some realistic stories. You will find yourself or someone close to you in any of these stories.

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YOUR COVER: (4/10) How can you experiment with the photo used for the cover? What filters can you add, and how can you crop it in an interesting way? What about how you present your title? The font of your title should be matching your genre, but your title font is actually closer to a whimsical, almost romantic genre. I suggest finding a font that corresponds well with your photo, and find a better way to present it in terms of placement, style, and sizing.

YOUR TITLE: (8/10) Your title is on the longer side, but I think that as this is a book full of short stories, it does represent it well and shows that this isn't just one story. It definitely draws me in and piques my curiosity, along with accurately representing this book; which is essentially your emotions, dreams, and ideas that are put into play.

YOUR BLURB: (3/5) You did a good job at expressing and representing what this was about, but there were a few sentences that were awkward and could be rephrased. If "The thing we must discuss more is the hunger not love," is the actual quote, then there should be quotations around it. If not, you should put the actual quote there. If you choose not to, then you should rewrite this as, "The thing we must discuss more than love is hunger." Other than that, I was impressed by the concise way you expressed what you wanted, what you wrote about, and what you hoped would come out of it.

YOUR HOOK: (3/5) Most of your hooks were very weak. Although you dove straight into the stories, there were either grammatical errors, or it seemed like you didn't think long about how to introduce the story. This is very important, as readers can feel free to leave after looking at the first sentence. Therefore, I suggest taking the time to focus on the composition of your hooks. How can you make them more intriguing?

YOUR GRAMMAR: (4/10) You often have repetitive and frequent grammar mistakes. Most of them are your punctuation with the dialogue, and your capitalization mistakes related to dialogue. If your dialogue is accompanied with a dialogue tag (he said, she yelled, they shouted, describing the way someone says something), the dialogue tag is a continuation of the dialogue sentence. For example, it doesn't make sense for the clause, "She said," to be a sentence by itself. This is also a perfect example of a dependent clause, because while it has a subject and a predicate, it doesn't make sense by itself; it depends on the dialogue to make sense. Therefore, it's part of the dialogue sentence. The dialogue should end in a comma to indicate that the sentence isn't complete, and the start of a dialogue tag is not capitalized, as it's not the start of a new sentence. The opposite goes for action tags. If your dialogue is accompanied by an action tag (she grinned/he sighed/they walked away, basically an action), the action should not be part of the dialogue sentence. The dialogue doesn't help the action tag make sense; the action tag should be a sentence by itself. Therefore, the dialogue should end in a period to signify the end of the sentence, and the start of the action tag should always be capitalized, as it's the start of a new sentence. Of course, the punctuation may vary. Exclamation marks and question marks can end a dialogue regardless of the tag accompanying it, as long as if it's a dialogue tag, the dialogue never ends in a period, and for an action tag, it never ends in a comma.