Essie's Critiques

On the Road | strikingstars

BLURB:

Six people. One drunken mishap. And their life's very own twisted survival movie.

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Ciara Albright's ideal night outs usually consist of dancing, meeting new people, and a whole lot of alcohol. 6 hours into another one of those nights -- she finally realized the real meaning of 'ideal' when it turned into something else entirely.

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YOUR COVER: (6/10) The photo is very vivid and eye-catching. However, the title isn't very easy to see, so I suggest adding some shadows to your text and experimenting with the color/sizing/presentation. There's also a lot going on with the background, so you could try to minimize that as well, or crop out the girl into a different scenery. If that's too much work, then I suggest going to a cover designer on Wattpad.

YOUR TITLE: (6/10) The title is simple and easy to remember. I did find several other stories with the same title, or several variations of the same title. You can definitely keep the title as it is, but I also suggest looking for something less generic, and something that can only be used for your story for originality.

YOUR BLURB: (3/5) I appreciate the shortness of the blurb, the conciseness, and the mysterious intrigue you've pulled me in with. I found a few things that could be changed. For example, you should write out the word, "six." Generally, any number from one to ten should be written out. You're also missing some commas between clauses, and you have tense slip-ups. You wrote your blurb in present tense, but in the blurb, you have a case where you wrote "turned" instead of the present tense format, "turn."

YOUR HOOK: (4/5) I loved how you brought us straight into the story with MC's mindset and surroundings. The first line immediately had me intrigued, and I got a sense of the mood of the general story so far. There were a few grammatical errors from your second paragraph on, although I'll mention that later on in your chapter reviews.

YOUR GRAMMAR: (3/10) I noticed that you tended to leave out punctuation in your dialogues. Just like ending sentences, dialogues need to be ended as well. Just because you add a dialogue mark to the end doesn't mean it's a complete sentence. It isn't complete until you add a punctuation mark at the end. I've pointed out some examples of this below. In addition, dialogues always need to be ended with dialogue marks at the end. I noticed that you didn't add a dialogue mark to the end of your dialogue when you used an em dash, which is incorrect.

Another mistake concerning your dialogue is the type of punctuation and capitalization you used in your dialogues. You struggled with your punctuation and capitalization with dialogues. 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. 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.