Dreamland Review Archive

Romanogers (T)

Your main comma issue is the lack of one before a conjunction. Conjunctions, words such as 'and', 'but' 'as' and so forth, are paired with a comma if both clauses around it are independent, meaning they standalone and make sense without clarification. Look here:

'Swimming was one of my coping mechanisms and it had been working quite well on the nights when sleep decided it wasn't going to happen.'

Separating these clauses with a period:

Swimming was one of my coping mechanisms. It had been working quite well on the nights when sleep decided it wasn't going to happen.'

Do you notice how these two clauses still make sense on their own--that means they are independent. Therefore, the correction for the original sentence would be to put a comma before the conjunction:

'Swimming was one of my coping mechanisms, and it had been working quite well on the nights when sleep decided it wasn't going to happen.'

#2: THE DASH

You'll never meet someone who loves the dash more than I do. Never. I have pictures of the em dash posted on my walls like other teenagers have pictures of singers. Am I kidding? I could be. But I really like the em dash in creative writing. It's so useful.

A big place the dash can be utilized is in the case of too many commas. Look here, from your book:

'I whipped my head to the left and saw, of all people, Steve, standing by the sliding doors coming toward the pool.'

Those are a lot of commas all at once, and you're actually missing another one after 'doors'. So how do you use the dash to minimize your commas?

'I whipped my head to the left and saw--out of all people--Steve, standing by the sliding doors, coming towards the pool.'

This isn't a great sentence, but it's grammatically correct. To rid of the excessive pauses here, I would write it like this:

'I whipped my head to the left and saw Steve--out of all people--standing by the sliding doors before coming towards the pool.'

Here, we've gotten rid of the commas entirely and used the dash to make this smoother. In addition, you're using the right dash, but you have a space on either side sometimes where you shouldn't. And just make sure you use the elongated dash. You can do this by writing on a program like Word or Google Docs and then copying it into Wattpad.

ii. DIALGOUE

I found your dialogue to be pretty perfect. I didn't find any mistakes, even when you used tag in the middle of dialogue. Your punctuation here was done very well.

iii. TYPOS

I didn't find any typos either, which shows me the clear work you've put into your story. It's always great to find stories that have been well-edited.

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