Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Sunshine: The Undead and Other Teenage Problems

Title: The Undead and Other Teenage Problems

Author: M_Sway_Writes

Reviewer: ray_of_sunshine9

Summary: 4.5/5

What a brilliant summary! It has everything you need – it introduces the protagonist and gives enough information about them to get a sense of who she is, it then throws in a bit of a plot twist with the dreams going up in smoke. Then, there's the conflict, and then, the stakes – we can make a pretty good assumption that this creature's stalking is probably not the safest thing.

Just one thing:

Teaming up with Noah Miller the coroner's son, they soon discover...

I would add a comma for fluency. It should be:

Teaming up with Noah Miller, the coroner's son, they soon discover...

Grammar: 3/5

Your grammar is probably, in my opinion, the area that could use some polishing. That's alright, though – let's go through some examples, shall we?

First of all, proper nouns. Whenever you're using a proper noun, you must ensure it is capitalised. For example:

But I preferred the solitude of old Wickery road, even if...

Since "Wickery Road" is the complete name of the road, the word 'road' should also be capitalised.

Collecting my thoughts, I shuffled further into the bathroom, "Uh, Yeah mum, I'm just going to take a shower."

First of all, you don't need to capitalise 'yeah' since it came after a comma. Next, 'mum' should be capitalised since it is used as a proper noun in that situation. It should be:

Collecting my thoughts, I shuffled further into the bathroom. "Uh, yeah Mum, I'm just going to take a shower."

You'll notice that I also changed the comma before the dialogue into a period. That brings me onto my next point: punctuating 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:

"We need to be careful about how much information we give him." Noah said.

It should be:

"We need to be careful about how much information we give him," Noah said.

Next, run-on sentences. This also impacted the writing fluency because of how jarring they are to read. Here's an example:

Small bushes and shrubbery grew all around and I sidestepped past them, weaving around the obstacles had my muscles screaming in protest.

On either side of the comma, you have two independent clauses. These are clauses that could be sentences on their own. Since they are adjoined by a comma, you have yourself a comma splice. Either change one of these to a subordinating clause, or replace the comma with a period.

Turning my heel I marched to the sport field.

In this example, we have the opposite problem – we're missing a comma to separate the subordinating clause and the independent clause. It should be: