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Review by Sunshine: The Criminal and the Detective

Title: The Criminal and the Detective

Author: BloodLake18

Summary: 3/5

In all honesty, I had to reread your summary a few times because I struggled to understand what it was trying to tell me. Part of it is because you fluctuate between past and present tense – making him very unsure as to where the summary sits in the timeline – and there are some pronouns used that make it unclear as to who you are referring to.

I do like, however, the use of rhetorical question, and there are a lot of fascinating elements mentioned within your summary. You also show your conflict, characters, and brief hints of the setting. You just need to go back and polish the summary so that, grammatically, it makes sense and is fluent to read. 

Grammar: 2/5

To be frank, I had quite a hard time reading your story due to the many grammatical and punctuation errors within your story. But don't stress – I'm here to go through them with you.

First of all, run-on sentences. Let's go through an example:

The image in my mind disappears, I halt my steps, my lips slightly open and I am left out blank, I stand still, confused.

That example above is a run-on sentence, which is when 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 the main independent clauses, you have a comma splice. It should look more like:

The image in my mind disappears. I halt my steps, my lips slightly open, and I am left blank. I stand still, confused.

See how I've replaced a lot of the commas with periods? That's because two independent clauses should not be stuck together.

Next, in general, you have incomplete sentences. For example:

Impatient to internalise my anger.

That is not a complete sentence. It is lacking a subject. A clause is something that has a subject and a verb.

Back to run-on sentences, you have a lot – and due to this incredibly inconsistency within the writing, we have moments that are quite difficult to understand and are very influent. For example:

I jump backwards the moment he appears in front of me then throw a punch, I grab his fist, throw it over as soon as he throws another kick I duck again and run across him getting the right opportunity to blast a kick under his chin and again into his abdomen.

That is a long sentence to read. Read it aloud – you are missing commas, you have commas where periods should be, and your tenses are slipping up.

Speaking of tenses, you fluctuate between past and present tense quite a bit. For example, we have two sentences side by side:

I raised an eyebrow, still listening. [raised = past tense]

Hanzo places both arms on the table and leans forward. [places, leans = present tense]

You need to keep your tenses consistent.

Next, you don't need to capitalise words if they are not at the start of a sentence, or if they are not a proper noun. For example:

Yet in front of me, If I cross the street...

You don't need to capitalise 'if'. It should be: