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Review by Sunshine: Falling Apart

Title: Falling Apart

Author: I_Tamilore_Onkowe

Summary: [NO SCORE – WILL NOT BE INCLUDED IN FINAL SCORE]

I have decided not to score the summary simply because I don't know how to score it. A traditionalist would probably give your summary a low score, because it doesn't really introduce much of the story. It gets the main character's name across and briefly introduces the theme underlying the story, but it is quite ambiguous and doesn't provide a general overview. However, I have a feeling that you weren't going for a traditional summary. Rather, you were going for an aesthetic one, which is popular on Wattpad. And since that is an intentional choice, I don't know how to score it. Sorry about that!

I will say, though, that it can be captivating to certain people. Some people like summaries like these, some people don't. It's very much a subjective thing. 

Grammar: 2/5

This story, grammatically, needs work. You've got the basics and fundamentals down, so well done there! But there's a few things that disrupted the fluency of the story.

First of all, tenses. You need to decide on one and stick to it. Right now, you're constantly switching between past tense and present tense, and this is especially frustrating for a reader because it prevents the story from being cohesive. For example, in one paragraph you have:

"Ashley walks up to the counter and takes his place in line." [the he walks is present tense]

Then, in the next paragraph, you have:

"Ashley settled on the triple chocolate cookies instead." [the settled is past tense]

As you can see here, the tense changes from present to past even though the story is still narrating in a linear fashion. So you need to choose one and stick with it.

You also need to work on punctuation before the end of dialogue. If the dialogue is followed by a verbal tag (such as 'he said', 'he muttered' – or anything that refers to how the character is aying the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, it should be a full-stop. For example:

"That'll be four dollars." She says as she hands it to him.

This above example is inaccurate. The 'she says' is a verbal tag, because it's referring to the words spoken. It should be:

"That'll be four dollars," she says as she hands it to him.

And there are, of course, the subtle but crucial errors. Make sure you only have capitals at the beginning of sentences or for a proper noun, and make sure you learn to differentiate some similar words such as "too", "two" and "to", and "your" and "you're". 

Character Building: 2/5

I understand that characters that we create are very close to our hearts. Please forgive me if I, in any way, hurt your feelings. But your characterisation needs work.

First of all, I feel like I know very little about the characters' personality traits. Most of their dialogue sounds awfully similar, and they seem to have very similar quirks. They all stutter when nervous, they all like making little quips, and there aren't enough idiosyncrasies that separates them for me. You need to flesh out the characters a lot more, because right now, I don't feel for them at all.