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Review by Gnome: Big Little Steps

Title: Big Little Steps

Author: Tifinylulu

Reviewer: GnomeMercy

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

I loved your summary; it's not the authentic Wattpad summary, but it's all there, and it explains that its a short story as well. Since it's not long at all, I can't really correct your grammar, but I certainly love the mysterious feeling! It goes with your actual story and it certainly intrigued me enough to check out your story!

Grammar: 2/5

Overall, your grammar is pretty decent. I can tell you know some of it. However, there were quite a bit of mistakes I found, especially to do with verbal tags.

For example, in the first sentece, it read:

"... and that skull scared the heck out of you. It took me fifteen good minutes to get you to talk again."

Now, usually if you start a sentence with an ellipses, it's usually alright to let it go as it's used as a continuation (sometimes). However, since this is the beginning of your story, I think it would be better if you started it with a capital like so:

"... And that skull scared the heck out of you. It took me fifteen good minutes to get you to talk again."

[though, ray_of_sunshine9 here to pitch in and be a nuisance, while it does look neater to have the very start of a story begin with a capital letter, in this instance, it is still grammatically correct to start the sentence with "... and" instead of "... And" - assuming that the sentence is a continuation]

Another error I found in your grammar was that your verbal tags were slightly off. I'll show you some examples:

"It was the last few ones we ever had," The second speaker replied before taking a sip of his now cold tea.

It should be:

"It was the last few ones we ever had," the second speaker replied before taking a sip of his now cold tea.

See, a comma means its part of a sentence, so that means you don't need to capitalise "the" on "the second speaker". This happens again (twice) towards the end as well. (Once, you capitalised when there a question mark, which is actually incorrect as the question mark makes the dialogue still a part of that sentence.)

Another error, similar to this one due to the fact that it was a verbal tag error, was that you ended the dialogue with a period and full stop. This was actually working, since the next part of the sentence was not a verbal tag. However, you did not capitalise the sentence:

"It was fun while it lasted." she smiled to herself.

It should be:

"It was fun while it lasted." She smiled to herself.

"She smiled to herself" is not a verbal tag as it does not fall under the category of verbal tags (e.g. he said, she retorted, they smiled, she welcomed, he stated and so on). Also, the dialogue ends in a period, indicating it's the end of a sentence and "she smiled to herself" is now a new sentence (this is an error that recurs. Try to see if the next sentence after is a verbal tag -- if so, then get rid of the period at the end of the dialogue -- or if it is just a sentence that just describes what they are doing. I counted about 6 or 7 times. If you read your work, you'll be able to find them).