Sapphire's Review Store 2.0

Review by Sunshine: System/First Phase: Error

Title: System/First Phase: Error

Author: TahsinHossain

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

I love the dramatic opening of your summary, and the way you weaved in an excerpt from your story was very clever. I decided not to judge your summary because of how ambiguous it is – we don't know who the boy and the voice are, and for all I know, it could even be the antagonist. I don't know the exact conflict (though, I suspect a war is at hand), and so while it sort of includes the stakes and conflict, it's hard to decide whether I should be rooting for this boy or not.

Quick note with the excerpt: if you are going to include dialogue in the excerpt, you should try to format it quickly. This means that the dialogue tag should be on the same line as the dialogue. So, instead of:

"The world has seen enough bloodshed. It needs no more. I'll make sure of that, even if it means turning against the world."

The boy said, looking at the vast sea in front of him.

It should be:

"The world has seen enough bloodshed. It needs no more. I'll make sure of that, even if it means turning against the world," the boy said, looking at the vast sea in front of him.

Grammar: 3/5

For the most part, your grammar was polished. There were minimal typos/spelling errors, so well done! The errors I did find, however, were rather consistent, and mostly related to punctuation and dialogue.

As stated above, the dialogue tag must be on the same line as the dialogue itself. For example, you wrote:

"We're finally here, huh?"

Len said.

It should be:

"We're finally here, huh?" Len said.

Next, let's talk punctuation and dialogue. 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:

"Good luck with your plan."-he said.

You don't need the little hyphen between the dialogue and the tag. Secondly, since 'he said' refers directly to the words being spoken, it should be:

"Good luck with your plan," he said.

Next, a few small errors that I saw here and there. Sometimes, you wrote 'theif' instead of 'thief', and you need to be careful of contractions. For example:

"Mashiro, were out of juice!"

Since Erika was trying to say 'we are' out of juice, it should be:

"Mashiro, we're out of juice!"

Next: ellipsis. When you use ellipsis, use three dots. No more, no less. For example, you wrote:

"No............... I don't think so."

For the sake of professionalism, it should be:

"No... I don't think so."

And, finally, be careful of plural vs singular. For example: