Essie's Critiques

Beguile | TheHappyCucumber

The secret parties continue, not knowing that they will unravel secrets after secrets. Not knowing that they are in a class full of deception, and as friendships break and lovers part, their true selves will unveil. The perfect students will reveal lies, more secrets, more masks to uncover, and will show the greatest art of murder.

Even after I briefly edited your blurb, there's still a lot of work to do. Most of your sentences can be rephrased. Additionally, you made your sentence structures so that they sound different from the meanings you're conveying. For example, you wrote that the secret party continued, not knowing that they will unravel secrets after secrets. A party is not a person, so there shouldn't be a "they." If you're referring to the students, you need to write it as that, because you're basically saying the party doesn't know they will unravel secrets.

YOUR HOOK: (3/5) Your descriptions in your hook were vivid and beautiful, but there were still many grammatical errors that need to be addressed, such as tense use and the difference between plural and singular words. I'll address these later in your chapter reviews, but it's important to understand these basic rules when writing in the future.

YOUR GRAMMAR: (3/10) I noticed that you tended to leave out punctuation in your dialogues. Just like ending sentences, dialogues need to be ended as well. Just because you add a dialogue mark to the end doesn't mean it's a complete sentence. It isn't complete until you add a punctuation mark at the end. I've pointed out some examples of this below. If your dialogue is accompanied with a dialogue tag (he said, she yelled, they shouted, describing the way someone says something), the dialogue tag is a continuation of the dialogue sentence. For example, it doesn't make sense for the clause, "She said," to be a sentence by itself. Therefore, it's part of the dialogue sentence. The dialogue should end in a comma to indicate that the sentence isn't complete, and the start of a dialogue tag is not capitalized, as it's not the start of a new sentence. The opposite goes for action tags. If your dialogue is accompanied by an action tag (she grinned/he sighed/they walked away, basically an action), the action should not be part of the dialogue sentence. The dialogue doesn't help the action tag make sense; the action tag should be a sentence by itself. Therefore, the dialogue should end in a period to signify the end of the sentence, and the start of the action tag should always be capitalized, as it's the start of a new sentence. Of course, the punctuation may vary. Exclamation marks and question marks can end a dialogue regardless of the tag accompanying it, as long as if it's a dialogue tag, the dialogue never ends in a period, and for an action tag, it never ends in a comma.

Example of dialogue + dialogue tag: "'I'm okay,' she said." OR "She said, 'I'm okay.'"

Example of dialogue + action tag: "'I'm okay.' She forced a smile." OR "She forced a smile. 'I'm okay.'"

You had a lot of comma mistakes. Keep in mind that commas are used to separate different clauses within a sentence, whether they're independent or dependent. An independent clause has a subject (who/what is doing the action) and a predicate (the action being done by the subject). Oftentimes, a sentence has two independent clauses, joined together with a conjunction. In the sentence, "I cried then Billy ran away," there are two independent clauses here. One is, "I cried," and the other is, "Billy ran away." Both have a subject and a predicate, and they're joined together by the conjunction, "then." Because of this, the two clauses still need to be separated with a comma, the correction being: "I cried, then Billy ran away."

Dependent clauses are just like independent clauses: they also have a subject and a predicate. However, dependent clauses are exactly like what they sound like; they're dependent on another clause. They don't make sense by themselves. For example, the clause, "I decided not to," has both a subject and a predicate, but it needs more context to make sense. There should be another clause attached or a sentence before it that it depends on making sense. When joined to another clause with a conjunction, the dependent clause should still be separated with a comma as well.