Dreamland Review Archive

Zero O' Clock (T)

'As he stared at the blanket of stars from the edge of the rooftop he smiled.'

So looking at this, there are two clauses here, but nothing separating them. 'He smiled' contains both a subject (he) and a verb (smiling) and therefore is its own clause. Here's the correction:

"As he stared at the blanket of stars from the edge of the rooftop, he smiled.'

#2: THE SEMICOLON

The semicolon is used to separate two independent yet still related clauses. Look here:

'The stone on his heart was heavy, he could feel its weight every time he moved.'

So that's a comma splice, which means you've separated two independent clauses with something not strong enough to divide them. We know these are independent because they would still make sense on their own:

'The stone on his heart was heavy. He could feel its weight every time he moved.'

So, therefore, you can keep the period, or you can use a semicolon there. I would recommend the semicolon because it makes the sentences less choppy.

 

ii. DIALGOUE

You've got a few dialogue issues. First, try to note that the dialogue tag begins with a lowercase even in the presence of an exclamation mark or question mark:

"You are twenty now!" He said.

That's not correct, it should be this, with the lower case tag:

"You are twenty now!" he said.

Next, dialogue tags can be continuous, but then the sentence needs to be as well:

"Happy Birthday to you," an annoying buzz disrupted her slumber, "Happy Birthday to you," it sang with mirth.

For one, you don't need to capitalize 'birthday' as far as I know. in addition, the problem here comes with the capital on the second line of dialogue. You have a couple options to correct this:

"Happy Birthday to you," an annoying buzz disrupted her slumber. "Happy Birthday to you," it sang with mirth.

"Happy Birthday to you," an annoying buzz disrupted her slumber, "happy Birthday to you," it sang with mirth.

Now I wouldn't go with the second one, since you have a dialogue tag on both sides, and that's not ideal. I would go with the first. You have a couple of these dialogue errors just to clean up.

You also have a tendency to confuse dialogue tags with action tags. Remember that while dialogue tags explain how dialogue is said, action tags describe how actions are said, and they have regular punctuation rules. Therefore:

Mrs. Min clicked her tongue, "do not try to be over smart, young lady."

is incorrect. This is how that should look:

Mrs. Min clicked her tongue. "Do not try to be smart with me, young lady."

iii. TYPOS

You have a few typos in your chapter worth looking over, beyond grammatical mistakes. I think downloading Grammarly will fix most of those problems!

0 9 / 1 5