The Raging Ocean - Chapter Three (Part I)

EDITING-POSSIBLY

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Kale
Review
Kale wrote a review · Sun Jun 24, 2012 8:15 pm

Hello there, this fine Review Day! I'm busy tackling various works without any reviews, and so there's a disproportionate amount of unreviewed later chapters of novels floating around, which is sad. Very sad. And so, while I haven't read previous chapters, hopefully I'll point out some helpful things in this review. Hopefully.

With that said, we have a prime example of a comma splice in the first sentence:

She remembered waking up on the chair, her back was hurting in three different places, and her neck was so stiff and sore she could barely move it.

The comma after "chair" should be a period, especially since you change tenses from simple past to past progressive.

straight long dirty blonde hair

I'm quoting this section for several reasons. First, you've misspelled "dirty"; this is not the only misspelling in here, and it really reflects poorly upon you as a writer since a quick spelling check would have caught these errors easily. It says to your readers that you don't care enough about your writing to ensure that it's perfectly readable, which implies that you don't care about your readers, either. I'm sure that was not the impression you wanted to give.

Secondly, there are a lot of stacked adjectives here. Adjectives are good and descriptive, but using too many all at once weakens adjectives and makes them more annoying and boring to read than anything else. In the quoted section, you have four adjectives stacked one on top of the other, and that makes for rather bland reading since your readers see all those adjectives all together and then skim over them to get to the more actiony bits.

The other major issue with this piece was the sentence structures. They were very repetitive, most of them following the "She verbed X." form, even the longer ones. This made reading parts of this feel like reading a list, which is not very exciting or interesting to do. You do have some variety in your sentences, but you need to add more to keep things a bit more interesting. Little things like that really add up to a lot over time, especially over longer works.

Overall, I couldn't really enjoy reading this because of all the spelling mistakes, the repetitive sentence structures, and the stacked adjectives. It really wasn't inviting to me as a reader to read, and so it was difficult to care about what was going on, or what was happening to the characters.

So proofread before posting, add more variety to your sentence structures, and try not to stack adjectives. It will make your writing more inviting to your readers.



I say, in matters of the heart, treat yo' self.
— Donna, Parks & Rec