In My Opinion

Roommates by somaacharya

Full title: Roommates || Dramione AU [COMPLETED] by somaacharya
Source: Utopian Fanfiction Awards 2024 by TheHappyWriters
Category: Harry Potter fandom
Mature: Y (strong swearing, sexual innuendo, underage drinking, violence, abuse)
Status: Complete
Special note: LGBTQIAP+
Round 1: 34/40
Round 2: 78/100
Round 3: 86/100, did not progress to round 4

Clicking the "External Link" button below the "Continue to next part" button will take you straight to the book.

*****

Round 1 total: 34/40

Title: 10/10
The forced proximity trope? Yes. Yes, please. 😉

Cover: 9/10
This is cute. Did you do the artwork yourself? I love how Draco looks so snarky, and he's definitely pestering Hermoine, and she's just trying so hard to ignore him. The gray-scale really goes well here, too, emphasizing Draco's light hair and her dark hair. My only complaint is with the title. The white "S" kind of disappears in that white window. If you could add a black outline or highlight to add more definition so it's easier to see, that would be ideal, because at first glance, it looks like the title is "ROOMMATE."

Also, side note, I think I've seen one other person who included the @ before their name on a book cover, and it's an interesting choice. I approve.

Summary: 8/10
Only issue here is punctuation. You should actually use commas in all the places you've used hyphens, and dependent clauses like "the Gryffindor princess" and "the Slytherin prince" should be set apart with commas, before and after ("Hermione, the Gryffindor princess, and"). I think I'd throw a comma in after "Hogwarts" in the third sentence, and in the last sentence, a hyphen would work really well after "chaos" to emphasize the contrasting outcomes.

First chapter (and everything that came before it): 7/10
Author's note: Um...I feel really awkward pointing this out, but the colon after "professional" should be a comma, and the comma after "writing" should be a period. 😅 Then, in the line below the gif, there's an accidental space between "comment" and the comma and a missing space between the comma and "vote." (And I also live for Wattpad comments.)

Prologue: Well, this is a nice little background info scene. Narcissa Malfoy and Minerva McGonagall meeting to discuss Draco's future. I approve.

So, you may not be a professional, but you write really well. The sneak peek into McGonagall's thoughts is well done, and the dialogue flows naturally. Your most common issue is the same as it was the blurb and the author's note - commas. And they can be tricky. My best recommendation here would be to use an editing tool to help you add them where they need to be and remove them where they don't. And take out those extra spaces you sometimes put in before or after a comma.

As far as suggestions with specific lines, I think I'd rephrase the first sentence of the second paragraph to something like, "Not that she was surprised." That aligns better with her exclamation about a "wonderful surprise" previously. In the fourth paragraph, you slip into present tense in the last sentence, so you should swap the present-tense verbs for their past-tense counterparts. When Narcissa first speaks, "reprimanded" is probably not the word you want to use. That would mean she's scolding or correcting McGonagall, and that's not what she's doing here. "Silently" doesn't work either, because she's not silent. The next time she speaks, you should close that dialogue out with a period and capitalize "she," because that's the start of a new, complete sentence, separate from the dialogue. You only use lowercase when there's a dialogue tag, which means the words immediately following the dialogue are incomplete on their own and directly describe how the dialogue is spoken. Later, when you want the trailing off effect, you should use a full ellipsis of three periods (...).