Elephant Reviews [CFCU]

Love Letter Which Changed My Life

By: varmaRuddarraju

First Impressions (ex. Cover, blurb, title)

-Title: The title is good.

-Cover: The cover is fine, but consider emphasizing the title a little more.

-Blurb: The blurb covers the essentials, but could be polished more in terms of the grammar.

Mechanics (ex. Grammar, sentence structure, etc.)

- There seems to be some grammar issues, so maybe the assistance of an editor could help.

- The dialogue formatting is quite unusual because some of the dialogue is boldfaced and some of it is italicized. This is highly untraditional and confusing at times, since bolding and italicization is often used for tonal emphasis.

- The sentence lengths are all on the shorter side- maybe varying the lengths can provide a smoother reading experience.

- There are a lot of cultural aspects that are explained well, but there are some acronyms that are not explained. In the Prologue, PTMs are introduced but the concept was not explained. In the fifteenth chapter titled "Engagement," KFC is mentioned, but could use some explanation as to what kind of establishment it is. In the eighteenth chapter, "The investigation," FIR is another acronym that is not explained, and in chapter 26, CTC

- Chapter 26 seems to have no line breaks.

- The chapter titles are inconsistent. Some have "Chapter 23" and then the chapter title, while others have "Episode 27" while many others do not have a number. Some chapters are in all capital letters while others are not. Also, chapter titles are usually capitalized and do not have a period at the end.

- There are a few instances in which there is a pronoun or name used, and then the name or clarifier in parentheses. For example, in Chapter 12, "Understanding Things," there's dialogue by Sunil that says: "Then, in that case, Karthik (kid) must have given the love letter to Navya." Instead, perhaps try to integrate the clarifier into the sentence, such as "Then, in that case, the kid Karthik must have given the love letter to Navya." or assume the readers are familiar enough with the name to be able to recognize who it is without the parenthetical clarifier.

- The change from one scene from another is a little abrupt. Also, be wary of implementing too many time skips of drastically different lengths in a single chapter. For example, in one of the chapters, there was a time break of a couple weeks, a day, and then a year.

This story has some interesting developments and twists in it, but some changes in mechanics and pacing might really maximize the storytelling. Best of luck with your writing journey!