Feedback: New story I am playing with

[GinnyStar]

http://forums.srellim.org/showthread.php?t=5806 Feedback if you wish MoMs! LD

As I PM my time is going to be short, but if you want to download a copy of it I will read it easy and when I find time to do so.

Over all nice story. there is an online spellcheck on line, I am still not great at add extra links, I thinks other members can help you out with finding the link, I know they have I have is listed but with this new med slowing me down I would hate to have given you the wong link. I have been using my e-mail address all day off and on as part of PR work so that help with typing it up.

PS Now I know why you want to know about tar on Pern, LOL!

GinnyStar.

[D. M. Domini]

The first thing that strikes me is the irregularity of the writing itself; you use & and 1/2 everywhere. While I understand that makes for quicker writing on the author's end, it makes it difficult to read; shortcuts like that are usually used for advertising, grocery lists, etc, and for me, they throw me out of the story...they tell me that the story isn't written by someone that knows the writing conventions, and this makes me less likely to give a story a chance. Were I you, I would go through and write all numbers and "ands" out in full (half a turn instead of 1/2 turn, etc.) Also, you are missing quite a lot of periods. Punctuation does matter...when I read things that are missing proper punctuation, my mental voice starts to sound very weird, because it's not getting the cues it needs from the writing. It starts to get "out of breath", and I abandon the story without finishing it because I'm not being convinced as a reader to suspend my disbelief so I can immerse myself in the story.

Secondly, I'm seeing a lot of typos...endings of words left out, spaces missing, etc. Stuff that even a spell check would not pick up, since the words are spelled correctly, but leave off endings like s and ed and ing and the like that change the meaning of the word. You would want to go through and give it a through editing, and clean that stuff out.

You've also a sentence fragment early on...

Shala took one last look at the cave that had been her home for the last 1/2 turn. Ever since the father failed to return from the fishing trip.

You'd probably want to use a dash or semicolon between "turn" and "ever" to get rid of the fragment.

As for spell-check...if you're using a PC, and you install Mozilla Firefox as your internet browser, it has an automatic spellcheck that underlines words in red even as you post, so you could use that. It's not always correct, but it helps catch some of the stuff.

Taking care of those things will help clean up the writing so that the underlying story is more clear and more readable. From there, it will be easier to critique the story structure itself.

Apologies if this comes off as harsh; I don't mean it that way. Essentially writing comes down to two different major skillsets; the grammar, spelling, and punctuation bit, and the story structure/characterization/plotting bit. Before you can work on the story structure, you'll need to get the grammar/spelling/punctuation perfected, and that probably is where you should focus first, before moving on.

A good way to learn and reinforce that knowledge in yourself is by cracking open a book you love (I did this with AMC books, and also Terry Goodkind books) and examining what the authors do...when they have dialogue, where do they put the periods? The commas? Do they ever use numbers in the text of the book, or are the numbers written out as words? Don't think about the story when you're looking at their work, just look at the grammar and punctuation at this point. Looking at this stuff will also teach you about dashes and dots (...) and how to use them to turn sentence fragments into compound sentences, which is something that I know my school never explained adequately to me when I attended.

Anyway, don't let this discourage you! Keep on writing; the more you write, the better you'll get.

[Kath]

I think it's the sentence fragments that stand out for me as the most obvious technical weakness.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handou...ar/g_frag.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handou...g_fragEX1.html

<- this site has a lot of exercises and examples illustrating what sort of fixes need to be made.

What's also clear though, is that she's done some research and put a lot of thought into making the story plausible and interesting. Those are VERY good things indeed. Fixing technical stuff is usually far less challenging than fixing a weak plot - there's definitely potential here.

[mawra]

I now relieze that I got into some bad habits while posting and will try not to use & Or 1/2 in writting. I will also work on the other areas. Thanks.

[GinnyStar]

Re: Shala rewrite Feedback

[GinnyStar]

Re: Shala rewrite I see my goof , much better more feedback later!
http://forums.srellim.org/showthread.php?t=5815 Much smother, that about all I have to say right now!

I just had something cross my mind here, if the orginal witer want to have the staff merg the two threads into one then things won't be so mix up!.

I well have to take out my goof or have a staff help out with it. Drats, trying to track of feedback and what the feedback is for is a bit of problem for me.