Eternal Critiques

NBR || Demon Hunters || @ChayAvalerias

Genre: Paranormal
Chapters: Prologue
#NBR Winning Critique!

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I. ELOCUTION

a. Major Grammar Corrections

~ "Tonight, she wanted stealth and speed so she left her katana home." - First, it may flow better with a comma after "speed". Second, since you already are telling this in past tense, you need to word this as "Tonight, she wanted stealth and speed, so she HAD left her katana home.", to separate a past action from a present action.

~ "A small group formed, as the warrior..." - I don't think a comma is necessary there. It seems to interrupt the flow.

~ "She dived into the floor..." - "Into" often implies passing through ("into") something. In this case, she lands ON the ground (I assume), not IN it, so using "onto" or even "toward" might be more appropriate. Also, "dived" and "dove" are both correct, but "dove" actually sounds better here.

b. Major Style Corrections

~ While possibly a matter of preference, I believe that when you have a double space between paragraphs, you have no need for an indentation as well. Usually, you just have one or the other. I could be wrong, I just distinctly remember losing points on several essays for making the same mistake, and being told to choose one method or the other. (In my personal experience, when it comes to Wattpad, simple double space works best.)

~ There is a lot of parallelism, which is normally very good, but I might suggest easing up just a bit on the adverb usage. I have the same tendency, but I am coming to find that sometimes the flow suffers and intended meaning seems forced whet there is an over abundance of adverbs. (For example, noting that the door she kicks down is "sturdy" really doesn't serve the sentence any more than not having it would. If anything, it's just an extra word, meaning it would do better to be cut off. Same goes, to a slightly lesser extent, to noting that the stain on the ground is "round".) The rule I go by when I'm proofreading is for each individual sentence, if it reads just as well without the adverb, take it out. This is a bit nitpicky, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

~ "She crumbled the paper and shoved it into her pocket. Then..." - "Crumble", by definition, implies something breaking into small fragments. I believe the word "crumple" would be more appropriate in this context. Second, I feel starting a sentence with "then" right there disrupts the flow significantly, and I think recombining it with the previous sentence would work better.

II. PLOT

1) Primary Points- MC heads into club and discreetly kills guards- MC chases assassination target- MC is knocked out on their trail

2) Logos: Consistency, Logicality, Understandability, and Realism~ How could she guess the blonde guy's exact age? I'd guess the closest she could get would be "early twenties" or "twenty-something".

~ I might have liked to have seen more detail in the part where she stabbed the guards. I get that she did it quickly, but even if it wasn't a necessarily important section, a small amount of information about what that looked like could be helpful for envisioning it (for example, where she struck them, the amount of pressure used, how they fell. Any of those would help.) I did the same thing on my own story once, using brevity to amplify how quickly and easily the character incapacitated the enemy, but got this same feedback several times over, so thought I would pass it along.

~ On the note of the guards: WHY did she kill them? Unless killing them is part of her ultimate goal (say, they're willingly and knowingly from the same group that her target is), it seems both extra ruthless and extra sloppy to do it like that rather than simply knocking them out. People will freak out much more over finding them dead than finding them unconscious, and really, unless there is a VERY specific reason she kills them, it just makes less sense over all.