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Review by Sunshine: Anagata

Title: Anagata

Author: artemisbreeze

Summary: [no score – will not be added to final score]

I decided not to score this summary simply because I don't know how to score it. It's not a traditional summary, as it doesn't introduce the main characters, conflict or stakes; rather, it focuses on the themes of the story in an ambiguous manner. I like to call these aesthetic summaries because they're flowery, intriguing, but don't really tell much about the story. And since that is an intentional choice, I don't know how to score it – sorry about that!

Grammar: 2/5

Right off the bat, I noticed that the first thing you need to work on is sticking to one tense. Your entire story kept going back and forth from past tense to present tense, which inhibited the fluency of the story. Let's look at the very first two sentences in your story:

"I looked up at my ceiling for the millionth time." [looked = past tense]

"As I navigate trough the old photos..." [navigate = present tense]

You need to make sure you stick to one. Also, 'trough' should be 'through.' This brings me onto my next point: spelling. There were quite a few incorrectly spelt words, or mix-ups between homophones. Along with this, you had some nouns that were capitalised even though they were not proper nouns.

A lot of the sentences, in general, just kept changing tense within the sentence. Example:

"Let's head back, shall we?" I said while Noah follows behind me in silent as we leave the shop.

The 'said' indicates past tense, but the rest of the sentence is present tense. This happened very often in your writing, and made the writing within your story very clunky and awkward to read.

Next: be careful of contractions. Basically, a contraction is when two words have been shortened into one by removing certain letters. An apostrophe is used to show those missing letters. You often used contractions even when they were not appropriate. For example:

"... my older sister, who's hair is in a bun..."

"Who's" is short for "who is." Therefore, you have written, "... my older sister, who is hair is in a bun." It should be:

"... my older sister, whose hair is in a bun..."

Finally, let's talk dialogue. Whenever a new character is speaking, their dialogue must be in a separate paragraph. Let's look at an example from your work:

I opened my door. "God, Hannah! How many times do I have to tell you!" I yelled back. She shrugged her shoulders. "Don't blame me."

Since both Hannah and Noah are speaking in that paragraph, it is incorrect. It should be split into:

I opened my door. "God, Hannah! How many times do I have to tell you!" I yelled back.

She shrugged her shoulders. "Don't blame me."

Next, let's talk about 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:

"I'm deadly serious." she said.

That above example is incorrect. Since "she said" refers directly to what is being spoken, it should be: