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Review by Sunshine: Authored By You

Title: Authored By You

Author: tale_a_grammer

Reviewer: ray_of_sunshine9

Summary: 4.5/5

I love your summary so much! The whole concept underpinning your novel is so fascinating and intriguing, and you very fluently introduce your protagonists and their differing sides of the story. There is a very professional, very quirky tone to the overall writing of it – and I'm genuinely very excited to read on, which is a good indication that your summary has reeled me in. To be completely honest, the only thing I would nit-pick is that first paragraph because it's not quite as cohesive as the rest of your summary is.

As in, what is the 'joyous news'? Was that sarcastic? And why has he been thrown out – exactly what behaviour led him there? If you could smoothen those out so it doesn't jump so much, then I think you've pretty much got an exceptional summary. Well done!

Grammar: 3.5/5

For the most part, your grammar was pretty clean and polished. However, there were some mistakes I found – some that were repeated quite consistently – so I thought we'd go through them with examples from the story itself.

First of all, dialogue and punctuation. 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:

"And that's the last one I found," William finished counting the papers.

Him finishing counting the papers is not a verbal dialogue tag, but an action beat. Therefore, it should be:

"And that's the last one I found." William finished counting the papers.

Another thing about dialogue – when two characters are speaking, each character should have a separate paragraph for their dialogue. For example:

"You didn't submit your homework again, Ms Scott," he said to her and Eliza lifted herself up to sit a little bit straighter. "I didn't get the time."

It should be:

"You didn't submit your homework again, Ms Scott," he said to her.

Eliza lifted herself up to sit a little bit straighter. "I didn't get the time."

For the most part, your tenses were also consistent, which is great. But you did have a few instances where you slipped into present tense, and sometimes, this happened within one sentence. For example:

He wanted to take every possible caution just so that Harvey stays asleep.

If we break it down:

He wanted to take every possible caution... [wanted = past tense]

...just so that Harvey stays asleep. [stays = present tense]

You need to ensure that your tenses are consistent, especially within a single sentence.

Also, be careful of run-on sentences. Basically, when you have two independent clauses joined together in a single sentence, it becomes a run-on sentence. For example: