urca

Grammar Nazi on the prowl~

Apologies beforehand if this is stuff you already know and stuff you would change after you've proofread. Also apologies if any of this is incorrect; I'm not perfect.

1. Okay, so don't capitalize everything after dialogue. When your dialogue should end in a period, and you have a "he/she said/whispered/etc." after it, it should use a comma instead, and the word after it should not be capitalized.

Ex. you have "Dan" She whispers softly
Correction: "Dan," she whispers softly

2. "I swear to you, I will. I swear on my heart" I speak in confidence / Okay, so speaking to someone in confidence is not the same as speaking to someone confidently. Speaking to someone in confidence is confiding to someone - telling someone a secret on the assumption that they will keep it confidential. What you want here is an adverb - confidently.

3. if I think about it properly (Which I don't, normally.) / When using a parenthese like this, the first word shouldn't be capitalized, and the period comes afterwords, right after the end parenthese.

Correction: if I think about it properly (which I don't, normally).

4. More of a technicality; this isn't really something wrong, per say. "The floods of people are flowing to the employee [...]" / Are there multiple distinct groups moving in? Are there multiple "floods," or is there one giant "flood" of people?

5. "We've got a lot on our plate right now, and as we're spending time here, we're going to miss the appointment" I keep on complaining, blowing away some of the stress from the flight, but try not to be harsh, after all, she is my childhood friend. / Lots of telling and not a lot of showing. Not technically wrong, again, but it could be worked on. Personally, I'd cut the entire italicized part and just keep the dialogue in to streamline the conversation, but it seems like there's a specific effect that you want to convey.

6. "You might wanna break the hug..." She nervously starts speaking in a higher tone. / Again, more technicalities, but it's always a better read once you fix these. Flow is weird here; in my opinion, using "she said nervously" serves the same purpose, and flows better.

7. "Allright" should be "Alright"

8. Nothing notable here. It's night, so the place is lighted, and the lighting is somewhat warm, but that's about it. There are some chairs to sit on, but it's filled with children and elderly, so we can't sit down. There's a restaurant to the side of the checkpoint, filled with many types of food, but 'we', as in 'I', are not hungry, so we skip it.

Okay, I find this a bit odd, because your protagonist is saying there's nothing notable there. And since you're writing from his perspective, "nothing notable" means the setting is unimportant and not something worth taking the time to describe. Yet you're writing out "notable" features of the setting, from your protagonist's point of view. It would be acceptable in third person, but it fails here. When you're writing in first person, what you should be focusing on is how your character sees it. If he's a long, flowery description person (Her eyes are sapphire-blue, if you look in her eyes, it's like you're gazing at the blue ocean. Her white skin compliments her silky golden hair, making her a rose among flowers that can never cease to stand out), then he should describe things like that more often than not. You are writing a subjective point of view; you are writing your story as your protagonist sees it.



Whew. Now, I'm sorry if there wasn't much on how to improve the actual content of your writing, but in my opinion, you can only get so far with sub-par grammar.

Don't be a lantz.

Please.

Otherwise, I thought the writing was pretty good, though I'm not quite sure what you're trying to achieve here. Are you writing this to develop the relationship? That's kinda the impression I'm getting, because it's a bit meaningless if you're trying to do anything else IMO.

Originally Posted by Suncofold

Grammar Nazi on the prowl~

Apologies beforehand if this is stuff you already know and stuff you would change after you've proofread. Also apologies if any of this is incorrect; I'm not perfect.

1. Okay, so don't capitalize everything after dialogue. When your dialogue should end in a period, and you have a "he/she said/whispered/etc." after it, it should use a comma instead, and the word after it should not be capitalized.

Ex. you have "Dan" She whispers softly
Correction: "Dan," she whispers softly

2. "I swear to you, I will. I swear on my heart" I speak in confidence / Okay, so speaking to someone in confidence is not the same as speaking to someone confidently. Speaking to someone in confidence is confiding to someone - telling someone a secret on the assumption that they will keep it confidential. What you want here is an adverb - confidently.

3. if I think about it properly (Which I don't, normally.) / When using a parenthese like this, the first word shouldn't be capitalized, and the period comes afterwords, right after the end parenthese.

Correction: if I think about it properly (which I don't, normally).

4. More of a technicality; this isn't really something wrong, per say. "The floods of people are flowing to the employee [...]" / Are there multiple distinct groups moving in? Are there multiple "floods," or is there one giant "flood" of people?

5. "We've got a lot on our plate right now, and as we're spending time here, we're going to miss the appointment" I keep on complaining, blowing away some of the stress from the flight, but try not to be harsh, after all, she is my childhood friend. / Lots of telling and not a lot of showing. Not technically wrong, again, but it could be worked on. Personally, I'd cut the entire italicized part and just keep the dialogue in to streamline the conversation, but it seems like there's a specific effect that you want to convey.

6. "You might wanna break the hug..." She nervously starts speaking in a higher tone. / Again, more technicalities, but it's always a better read once you fix these. Flow is weird here; in my opinion, using "she said nervously" serves the same purpose, and flows better.

7. "Allright" should be "Alright"

8. Nothing notable here. It's night, so the place is lighted, and the lighting is somewhat warm, but that's about it. There are some chairs to sit on, but it's filled with children and elderly, so we can't sit down. There's a restaurant to the side of the checkpoint, filled with many types of food, but 'we', as in 'I', are not hungry, so we skip it.

Okay, I find this a bit odd, because your protagonist is saying there's nothing notable there. And since you're writing from his perspective, "nothing notable" means the setting is unimportant and not something worth taking the time to describe. Yet you're writing out "notable" features of the setting, from your protagonist's point of view. It would be acceptable in third person, but it fails here. When you're writing in first person, what you should be focusing on is how your character sees it. If he's a long, flowery description person (Her eyes are sapphire-blue, if you look in her eyes, it's like you're gazing at the blue ocean. Her white skin compliments her silky golden hair, making her a rose among flowers that can never cease to stand out), then he should describe things like that more often than not. You are writing a subjective point of view; you are writing your story as your protagonist sees it.



Whew. Now, I'm sorry if there wasn't much on how to improve the actual content of your writing, but in my opinion, you can only get so far with sub-par grammar.

Don't be a lantz.

Please.

Otherwise, I thought the writing was pretty good, though I'm not quite sure what you're trying to achieve here. Are you writing this to develop the relationship? That's kinda the impression I'm getting, because it's a bit meaningless if you're trying to do anything else IMO.

First off, I'd like to thank you for taking your time and reading in my humble blog, and I'd like to thank you for your criticism.

All the points you pointed at about the grammar are valid, but I'm trying to overcome it (As I said, English isn't really my main language. My main language is Arabic :3). But I'll address some points due to the need of an explanation from my side :P

5-For the 'telling and not showing' in the complaining part, I wanted it to be like this and try to keep it flowing at the same time because I needed to 'present' the relationship between the two characters. This criticism was also given to me by a friend of mine, and I'm focused on it

8-I think the fact that you have given me a bit of an explanation on this one's quite helpful. I still need to work on some sections in my writing, but this one and the 'show, not tell' one are what I need to focus on along with the grammar.


I think the most important thing I learned from your criticism is to ask myself questions such as 'what do I want to achieve with this scene?
Does this paragraph needs to be told or showed? Is this paragraph impactful?

Once again, thanks a lot for taking some of your personal time to spend on my humble blog.

P.S: Question, what does 'don't be a lantz' mean?XD

Haha no prob, just procrastinating on homework >.>

I'm aware that you're not a native speaker, and that doesn't really affect how I criticize grammar. I mean, obviously it's understandable that you'd be less proficient with English since it's not your first language, but incorrect grammar is still incorrect. :3 Not your fault at all.

5. Alright, if you have something you need to express, then that's usually okay. Obviously, the flow could be improved, but it gets the point across I guess.

By the way, I was noticing that you seem to be using a lot of different "said" words. For example, you have murmur, utter, speak, voice, etc. I'm going to reference Elf here, and say that you really don't need to be doing this. Yes, some words fit better when you have a specific tone you want a character to use, like murmur. Yet here, it seems like you're trying too hard to avoid using "said." Honestly, it doesn't really matter; the vast majority (a.k.a. 99.9%) of English speakers put very little significance on it. They'll read the sentence as if it's not there. So you should probably use "said/says/say" like 90% of the time, and use specialized words only when necessary.

Also, I keep on complaining, blowing away some of the stress from the flight, but try not to be harsh, after all, she is my childhood friend is a run-on sentence. I won't explain the really complex part of English that explains why the comma after harsh should instead be a semi-colon, because I'm not sure if I can explain it correctly. In this case, the simplest solution is to split the sentence up into two.

I keep on complaining, blowing away some of the stress from the flight, but try not to be harsh. After all, she is my childhood friend.

8. Pretty much exactly it. Just remember that you are writing from the view of a character, not narrating. For example, when walking through a mall, a skater would notice things like shoe stores, while a typical teenage girl would note all the clothing and makeup stores. What you describe is what stands out to your protagonist.

Yeah, no scene in any kind of literature shouldn't have a purpose. Each and every scene that you choose to put in your literature should have purpose.

And don't worry about lantz too much; he hangs out in GD and the Fanfic section. A little bit in the RP section too.