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Review by Sunshine: Crossing the 'i's and Dotting the 't's

Title: Crossing the 'i's and Dotting the 't's

Author: TripuWrites

Summary: 4.5/5

I don't even know the name of your protagonist, but this summary alone has made me love her – I love the way you succinctly described her before relating her back to the conflict and stakes at hand. It's not easy to include stakes for a contemporary story like this, but you handled it well; it's very clear that she has a dream, and that dream means a lot to her.

You hide a lot of information from the readers in the summary, and I can't help but wonder why. Is the protagonist name and the setting of the story a spoiler of some sort? Is she in India? When you introduce 'a girl', that was the perfect opportunity to introduce her name, as well as her dream. When you tell the reader she's in a competitive society, that's also a perfect time to tell the reader where the location is and why it is so competitive.

Anyways, I loved the almost philosophical way you ended the summary, and how you very cleverly related it back to the title. Well done! 

Grammar: 3/5

Grammar wise, your story was an interesting case. There were some chapters that I read where I didn't run into any errors, but there were other chapters that I read in which I found quite a few errors. Anyways, that aside, let's discuss the nitty-gritty:

You had a few run-on sentences here and there, as well as a few missing full-stops. I highly suggest you go back and read your entire story aloud, and look for where you might need pauses in some of your sentences; a pause usually suggests that you need some form of punctuation there.

Next, you also had spelling errors here and there. For example, in chapter five:

"... and had reducad the tution fee..."

In the example above, you have two misspelt words: reduced, and tuition. And, again, in chapter ten:

"I chocked on my saliva."

I believe you meant 'choked'.

You also changed tense towards the start of the story. For example, the following two sentences came straight after each other:

"I closed my eyes and let my wind wander." [closed = past tense]

"There is no excuse for Karan's behaviour." [is = present tense]

Make sure you stick to past tense throughout the entire story.

Another issue I found was the capitalisation of proper nouns. This is a little tricky, but when words such as 'mum' or 'dad' are used as names (as in, that is what the character is calling them instead of an actual name), it should be capitalised. For example:

"No need to, ma..."

It should be:

"No need to, Ma..."

Overall, the biggest issue I found was in 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:

"TMI" I shouted.

You need punctuation before the closing inverted commas, and since the 'I shouted' directed refers to the dialogue being spoken, it should be: