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Review by Sunshine: Survive Another Day

Title: Survive Another Day

Author: belaurent

Summary: [no score – will not be included in final score]

I decided, ultimately, not to score your summary, simply because I don't think it was your intention to write an elaborate, traditional summary. That being said, I think your summary is short, sweet and a great way to intrigue readers. It gets the point across in concise manner, so well done!

Just a warning, though: you had a few punctuation mistakes throughout it. Let's go through them, shall we?

Since Max came out of the closet three months ago his friends turned into bullies.

First of all, you're missing a comma between the words 'ago' and 'his'.

But what will happen when one day the bullies turn into real monsters.

In this above sentence, you're missing a question mark at the end (since it is a question). Additionally, you need commas separating the 'one day' from the rest of the sentence. It should look like this:

But what will happen when, one day, the bullies turn into real monsters? 

Grammar: 2/5

Alright, so as I alluded to in the previous section about the summary, your grammar needs a bit of work. That's not a huge problem – fixing up technical things is a lot easier than, let's say, dealing with plot-holes. It just takes a keen-eye and a bit of background knowledge. So, without further ado, let's launch into it, shall we?

The biggest issue I found within your story was tense. You kept darting back and forth between past and present tense, which was often disconcerting for the reader. You need to choose one tense and stick to it. For example:

"One of my friends spat at me while another one of them kicks me in the guts."

In that above sentence, you inaccurately included both past and present tense. Let's break it down further:

"My of my friends spat..." [spat = past tense]

"... one of them kicks me in the guts." [kicks = present tense]

You need to choose one of the tenses and use it throughout your entire story.

Along with tense, I also found that you had many run-on sentences. Also, you need to watch out for your homophones, such as to, two and too. For example:

"Diego was getting a little to excited."

It should be 'too', which can mean 'excessively' or 'additionally', as opposed to 'to', which is more like a preposition or infinitive marker.

The biggest issue I found throughout your story was dialogue and punctuation. If dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she 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 exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Diego, call an ambulance." He orders.

'He orders' directly refers to the dialogue spoken. It should be:

"Diego, call an ambulance," he orders.

Additionally, when there is dialogue from more than one character, each character should have their dialogue on a separate paragraph. Let's take this excerpt from your story: