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Review by Gnome: Random Stories

Title: Random Stories 

Author: MsCrysaniaMajere

Reviewer: GnomeMercy

Summary: [no score -- will not be added to final score]

It's hard to judge short story summaries, but you did a good job! You mentioned everything that'll be there, and the topics you might cover, as well as why you wrote these stories. Well done!

Grammar: 3/5

Your grammar was pretty clean, and you certainly knew your basics, but there a few things I noticed.

Firstly, anything like (??) or (?!) or (!!!!) is grammatically incorrect. I understand its use in emphasis, but if you want to show someone really means something or is shouting, work it into the verbal tag. A verbal tag is basically anything like "he said", "she replied". On the subject of a verbal tag, you had some errors with that, too.

Here are some examples from your book and I'll explain why they're errors:

"What do you mean you'll be late? Everyone's here already!" She yelled on the phone.

And:

"If you stayed the whole day with us, you wouldn't be in this situation, the weather was fine earlier." She retorted.

Since "she retorted" is a verbal tag, and thus technically part of the dialogue sentence, you shouldn't put a period (full stop) there, but rather a comma (or a ? and ! depending on the situation. Dashes can be used too). Here is the corrected version:

"If you stayed the whole day with us, you wouldn't be in this situation, the weather was fine earlier," she retorted.

This works similarly with question and exclamation marks. While you're allowed to use them before a verbal tag. There's no need to capitalise the verbal tag itself. So, the corrected version would be:

"What do you mean you'll be late? Everyone's here already!" she yelled on the phone.

However, there were some times when you did this correctly, so try to keep it consistent!

Also, there were a few typos, especially in the latest short stories. I recommend you do a reread of all your short stories just to clean it up a bit!

Overall, you knew your basics when it came to grammar, but I do reccomend you clean some errors up.

Writing Style + Characters: 6/10

In terms of writing style, you did a pretty good job. However, there were a few problems.

Firstly, redundancy. Here is an example of a redundant sentence:

No-one, not even him, noticed the moment Romeo's eyes started to open. His eyelids blinked a few times before his eyes slowly began to open.

Redundancy makes things sound a little stilted and awkward, and it's also not necessary to repeat things. To solve this problem, try rephrasing the sentence or using synonyms (but be careful with synonyms as some aren't as interchangeable).

There was also some similar sentence structure where the beginnings of sentences were always (subject + verb). Now, doing it once or twice in a row is fine, but three times or more and it gets noticeable. It's easy to correct, though: all you need to do is rephrase the sentence. Here's an example:

He stayed still for a while then slowly helped him lie down and be more comfortable.

He got up and looked around, he saw the bookshelf and curiously watched where his book had been placed.

He found it, and frowned noticing that Shen already had that book, although his was a paperback.

In terms of characters, it's hard to judge them in short stories, but yours seemed alright and had slightly different personalities. I liked that I could understand that they were different people, and that they had different motivations and ambitions.

Overall, a good job with both writing style and characters, but there's still a bit to work on with writing style.

Plot: 4/5

Overall, you had some interesting storylines! I really liked the way you changed Romeo and Juliet, and it was cool to see both him and Julian got a happy ending. Unfortunately, there's not much I can say here, but try to have a wide range of plots so nothing gets repeated.

OVERALL SCORE: 13/20

Overall, a good job on short stories. There are just a few things to fix, but other than that well done!