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Review by Sunshine: The Missing Gem

Title: The Missing Gem

Author: missmarswrites

Summary: 3.5/5

I really struggled to judge this summary, in all honesty. It's very cinematic, and contains some brilliant aspects – it introduces the two protagonists, I love how it starts with one side of the story and goes on to introduce the second side, and hints at how these two sides may intertwine.

However, I'm finding that, due to the rather ambiguous nature of the summary, it is lacking a few things.

While I understand how you want to be quite ambiguous and whimsical by saying "happiness is in the hands of fate", but then we don't actually know what the conflict is. We don't know how they meet, or what will go wrong, or what sort of hurdles they will have to jump over. We don't know if there are any stakes, and we don't know the setting either.

Also, watch out – you are missing a few commas, and you have a tense change in the very first sentence. However, we'll focus more on grammar and punctuation in the next section. 

Grammar: 3/5

Your grammar could definitely use some work, but don't worry – I'm here to help.

First of all, you are using commas in places where commas are not necessary, and you are also lacking commas in places where they are necessary. I suggest reading your story aloud to see where you need a pause for fluency, and those pauses usually indicate that you need a form of punctuation there. Additionally, watch out for run-on sentences. Here is an example:

She could not go back to sleep and just lying in bed doing nothing while staring at a white wall was so not her thing, she was so not that type of girl.

That sentence is a run-on sentence; a sentence where you have two independent clauses in one sentence with a comma or nothing to separate them. In this case, since you've used a comma between "so not her thing" and "she was so not that type of girl", you have a comma splice. To resolve this, replace the comma with either a semicolon, dash, or full-stop.

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 decided to get some work done." She explained.

It should be:

"I decided to get some work done," she explained.

Also watch out for apostrophes. In cases like "it's", the apostrophe is used to show that the word is a contraction of "it is". So, in examples such as:

My tongue did its' job.

You don't actually need the apostrophe.

Also, watch out for basic inconsistencies in the writing – make sure you are using the noun when the noun is required, and not the verb. For example:

My best friend sounded confuse, perplex...

It should be:

My best friend sounded confused, perplexed...

You also had typos written in the story within the story, but I assumed that may have been intentional since Nic was typing so quickly and was really into what she was writing.