Anna's Reviews

1 ✿ Her Bleeding Heart | love_taebear33

love_taebear33

✿ first impression: title, cover and description (7/15)

the cover is fine. not too impressive but could use more work. i'm not a graphic designer however, so i can't give thorough help there.

title: there are not many stories named as yours when i searched on wattpad, and yours came first when i searched! so that's great.

the description has WAY too many mistakes, grammatical and in writing style. below i show some of them:

i felt as if this description could be summarised to be waaay shorter because many of the sentences were just repeated in different ways. it also kinda gave away more than necessary? it's not wrong but needless. try to make it concise and straight to the point but without spoilers.

it looked like you mixed pronouns pretty often and messed some punctuation, especially capitalising in the middle of the sentence.

i'll explain grammatical mistakes in the grammar section.

✿ plot (5/20)

the plot was too unrealistic. if i asked myself if this could happen in real life, i don't think it's a yes. it felt as if that family you talked about didn't live on earth in a country with laws and rules. are there no police or family protection organisations? from tara lying about aarohi hurting her, to their family believing it without actually making sure, it didn't seem like sth that would happen irl for me.

ask yourself, even if your sister really hurt you, would your parents leave it like that and make her a slave for the family? if that's how it works, then i'd imagine you need to get help from police or sth. parents are supposed to raise their kids, not ditch them when they make mistakes. if your sister hit you, they'd make her apologise and make it up between you two again. any behaviour other than that is illegal, so aarohi can report this abuse.

then later in the story you state that police is corrupted and their family has influence. you also explained to me that's unfortunately true in india. it explained a lot but still sounded cliche to me.

✿ characters (12/20)

i dislike the way you introduced the characters. there wasn't even a need to do two chapters to introduce them. if you liked to show pictures of the cast, that's fine, but i felt as if you told away too much that it could spoil the story, so i didn't read all that you wrote about them. i wanted it to be the story's job to tell me how these characters are like, not a straightforward explanation about each of them.

and apparently you have many characters. hard to keep track with them. but overall, it seemed like you knew what each would serve.

i will not repeat they were unrealistic again since i tackled that in the plot section. i'd only suggest you to ask yourself, are these characters a relatable display of real life people? unless you're writing a paranormal story, in my opinion, they weren't.

✿ grammar (7/15)

since you told me english isn't your first language, i'll try to go in detail in this section to help in my best capacity:

□ punctuation marks stick to the word before them. that was a major mistake in your stroy. don't leave a space behind it.

□ errors in compound sentences: when you use a coordinator (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so: you can use the acronym FANBOYS to help you remember the seven coordinators) to join full meaning sentences, use a comma.

For example → she washed her face, and she brushed her teeth.

Notice that if you omit the 'and' in the second sentence, the sentence is meaningful (independent).

However, you don't need a comma if you omit the second 'she' → she washed her face and brushed her teeth.

□ you don't always enclose the quotation marks with the right punctuation mark.

→ When you use a speech tag (said and anything in the meaning of it: whisper, mutter...), you enclose with a comma and the word after the quotation isn't capitalised.

e.g. "She is lovely," she said.

OR: She said, "She is lovely."

→ When you use something other than that, aka dialogue beats (a description of the physical action a character makes while speaking), you enclose with a period and the next word is capitalised.

e.g. "She is lovely." She nodded.

□ too much tense hopping, especially in that flashback. once past then again present.

try to proofread your story again. there's an app called grammarly that i promise will help loaaads. it could be downloaded as a keyboard that corrects grammatical errors, or an add-on in microsoft office. give it a shot if you need help with grammar!

✿ writing style (10/30)

there is a lack of descriptions and details in the story. in many places, i wished to know more about how the character felt deep down about something, or how they would react in the future. i aslo wished to know their facial expressions and moves too.

it felt more like a scenario for a movie or drama, and it was the actors job to display the emotions and expressions. with writing, it's different. you have to show -not just tell straightforwardly- with your own writing style how the characters interact and feel. this style develops by time and experience. and the more books you read, the better you learn :)

the pov was apparently third person. you didn't need to say "author's pov" or "tara's". it wasn't hers anyway. it was third person.

the grammatical errors made it so hard to enjoy the story because they made some parts confusing as well. also, there wasn't much of a vocab or sentencing diversity.

the centred marging and bolding of the flashback was unnecessary. to me, it was rather distracting. the whole flashback in my opinion was unnecessary. i think it's better if you make a prologue about the background of the story rather than make a looong flashback about how their complicated relationship started. in short, i think you started the story in the wrong point of time, so that's why you needed to shove in a flashback.

✿ overall (41/100)

you have so much room for improvement. i think you still need to read more stories and gain experience and style :) please don't be discouraged! it's going to be a long way to learn but a fun one with the passion for writing~