Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Sunshine: In Between the Lines

Title: In Between the Lines

Author: caCrisostomo

Reviewer: ray_of_sunshine9

Summary: 4/5

I love your summary! I think the one sentence hook at the beginning was phenomenal and I was reeled in right away. Additionally, the summary is written in a quirky, light-hearted way that already engages the reader but also includes the characters and conflict. Personally, I wish you had one more sentence that would more directly hint at the romance to come, or at least show that there will be more tension. Otherwise, it's almost like, okay, ghost writer does the job, boom. Done. I was just itching for that one extra line that would show that there will be more juicy tension and conflict as their lives intertwine.

And finally, be careful of your usage of semicolons! They're used to separate independent clauses. I'll talk about this more in the next part. 

Grammar: 3/5

Your story was pretty polished, but there were some consistent errors you were making throughout it. Let's go through them, shall we?

I mentioned semicolons above, so we'll start with that. Basically, you've gotten the gist of using semicolons when listing complex things, but the other time you've used them is to separate two clauses. This is fine, but when you use a semicolon, you must make sure that both clauses on either side of it are independent clauses – this means that they are complete sentences on their own. For example:

He took a deep breath and got up to his bare feet on the carpet; his skin being subsumed by thick dust as he walked up the glass staircase in a fast march.

The issue is that the second clause, the part about the skin, is not a complete sentence on its own. You need to change it to a complete sentence, or change the semicolon to a comma.

Next, dialogue. When dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'they exclaimed – or anything referring to how the character says the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, this comma should be replaced by a period (or a question mark for a question, and an exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

" 'The bright light of dawn, naïve is thy dream' " Astorious couldn't help a flattered smile.

A few mistakes there. First of all, you do not need the spaces between the quotation marks. Additionally, since the dialogue is followed by an action beat, it should look like:

"'The bright light of dawn, naïve is thy dream.'" Astorious couldn't help a flattered smile.

Also, it's sometimes unclear who is speaking. For example:

"I will tell them." She said.

"I-"

"Don't worry, let me figure this out." Allyson had an idea in mind, but her concerns were far from gone. "I will be able to write, just give me more time to settle, Ally."

That last paragraph confused me. I thought Ally was speaking, because the middle 'I' was Astorious, but then the next sentence, it sounded like Astorious considering he said Ally? Which leads me to conclude that maybe you had both Ally and Astorious's dialogue in one paragraph, which is incorrect. Additionally, the punctuation before the dialogue tags are incorrect. Consider: