Young Writers Society

Hi there, Carlak! I'm MJ, and I'm here to offer you some (hopefully) helpful critique.

First off, I'm glad that you have a venue to tell your story, and I hope that writing everything down has helped you deal with everything that has happened. Obviously, since this is a story about your personal life, I can't really critique it as far as plot elements and characters, but there are a few other elements of your story that I have some tips for you to further improve your writing. I can't emphasize enough that you've already taken the hardest step; you already have words on the page, and now all that's left to do to polish this piece up is to make a few stylistic changes.

One thing I noticed is that you have a lot of missing commas. I don't want to go super in-depth here, but there are a bunch of free guides you can find on the Internet. Of course, it's completely understandable if you knew all the rules but rushed through this piece, but it's something you will want to fix as it can be a distraction from your actual piece. There's a great guide on Grammarly that you can read by clicking on this link. As some of the other reviewers have pointed out, there are some other grammar mistakes here too, so just be mindful of doing your best to use proper grammar so readers aren't distracted by your grammar mistakes and can focus on your story.

The second main point of critique I have to offer is that your story seems a little roundabout and doesn't end with a final point. You're telling your life story here, but it's not really to prove a point or to give an example of something specific in your life that happened. Of course, the way you have it now is perfectly fine, and the only reason you need to change that is if your goal in writing this is to prove a point. You don't have to persuade your reader of anything, but understand that in order for this to qualify as a persuasive essay, you need to have an argument that you support with proof.

I hope this critique was helpful for you, and if you have any questions, please let me know and I'll do my best to clear up any confusion. I want to reiterate that you do not need to change anything of what you've written here, especially if you were using writing as a vent, but this is my critique from a literary standpoint. Have a wonderful Review Day!

All my best,
MJTucker

Hi, Carlak! Happy Review Day ~

So, I found this a really interesting piece, and I'm glad you're comfortable enough with your past to be able to share your story. Keeping that in mind, I'm simply critiquing your writing so that you can present it better, not for the content.

Overall, this piece felt kind of rushed. I totally understand not wanting to go into too many details about your personal life (especially since this is an online website), but there still feels like a good amount of summary about each of the events. In order to make a real impact on the reader and make them sympathize and empathize, you want to try to paint out the details with a mix of both emotion and how these events were coped with before moving on to the next event.

This is especially true for the last paragraph. There are a lot of events that are all summarized in one long paragraph that could be explored a lot more. Now, I also understand that if you spent an equal amount of time on every single event, this piece would absurdly long and you may not want to focus on every event with the same weight as the last. So for that, I would recommend you to maybe try to map out the really big events (thinking about it like a fictional novel, where you want to hit important plot points) and then try to focus on those.

Going off of that, what I think this piece could benefit from is having a focused view of your past. Maybe think about what is some huge thing that you learned from all of this? If you're writing this for others to read, what are you trying to tell other people? Then, once you have that idea, then it would be easier to narrow down what events you should focus on and shaped what your view of the world is today. That being said, there's nothing wrong with wanting to summarize what happened to you, but in the case of a memoir, those are typically done as some kind of exploration of self.

Writing wise, my recommendation to you would be to try to vary your sentence structure a little bit more. For instance, instead of using lots of simple sentence such as "I did this" or "he did that" maybe trying to have different kinds of complex sentences such as "as this was happening, I did this" or "there was some kind of event, which caused me to feel like this." These are just generic examples to illustrate a point, but this would really improve the flow and the feel of the piece.

I think it's awesome you're exploring your past! I wish you lots of luck editing and working on this in the future. If you have any further questions, my inbox is always open!

Best wishes ~
- Wolfe

This was an interesting story. I liked the way that you recounted a lot of events from memory and used specific dates, this helps the reader get a good sense of the events and their timeframe.

I was a little confused throughout because I wasn't really sure where the story was going. Make sure when you write, you a clear idea of what you want to say and that you have a message. Reading stories is fun, but it's important that any piece of writing has a theme that the reader can pick up on and remember.

I would also just like to correct a little bit of the grammar. Firstly, there were two places in which the sentence should read "there are" instead of "there is". Also, I think you could insert a few commas in places like "The next day was Saturday, so" and "which I was not bothered by, as I could see all of my friends"


Furthermore, I would suggest writing out numbers, especially if they are lower, as this makes the writing seem more professional, so seven instead of 7 and one instead of 1.


I think it would be great if you varied the sentence structure a little more, as most of the sentences began with "I". Going along with this, I would recommend showing your reader certain things, rather than just saying them. For example, instead of: "she looked very serious" try "a stern look plastered on her face,".


Overall great work, this was fun to read. Have a great day!