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Review by Sunshine: Against You

Title: Against You

Author: Iluvbooks5198

Summary: 3.5/5

Your summary is pretty good in that it's a pretty standard teen-fiction romance blurb. It introduces the protagonist and her sad backstory, it then hints at the love interest that comes in and makes the story, and it shows that there may be room for development for the character. Again, it contains all the right things – so well done!

One thing you definitely need to work on is polishing the technical things – tense, grammar, and punctuation. For example, you're missing spaces after punctuation, you have sentences missing commas, and you change tense. Don't worry – I'll get more into this in the following section. 

Grammar: 1.5/5

Overall, this is where you probably need the most work. Don't worry, though, I'll go through the basic rules with you, and besides, the technical stuff is arguably the easiest to fix.

First of all, when you have punctuation – whether it be a full-stop, comma, colon, or any alternate forms of punctuation – there must be a space after the punctuation. For example:

... then I saw him.Aaron Miles walking towards...

You need a space after the full-stop. It should look like:

... then I saw him. Aaron Miles walking towards...

Next, let's talk about dialogue and punctuation. If dialogue is followed by a verbal dialogue tag (such as 'he said', 'she whispered', 'she exclaimed' – or anything referring to how the character says the words), there should be a comma before the closing inverted commas. If it's anything else, this comma should be replaced by a period (or a question mark for a question and exclamation mark for an exclamation). For example:

"Hey it will be alright " Nikki says.

First of all, you don't need the space before the closing inverted commas. Next, you must have punctuation before the closing inverted commas. It should look like:

"Hey, it will be alright," Nikki says.

Another example:

"What" I didn't agree to this ........ Why did even agree to listen to him?

There are several errors in the example above. First of all, you're missing punctuation before the closing inverted commas. Then, your ellipsis has about eight periods (........) when it should only have three (...). Finally, you're also missing the word 'I' for the question to make sense. It should be:

What?" I didn't agree to this... Why did I even agree to listen to him?

Since we are still on dialogue, another thing you need to be aware of is that each character should have a separate paragraph for their dialogue. Whenever a new character speaks, their dialogue should begin in a new paragraph. For example:

" I am here to see my girlfriend " he says. "Your what now ?" I exclaim in surprise.

Apart from all the unnecessary spacing and lack of puctuation, you also have two characters speaking in one paragraph. It should be:

"I am here to see my girlfriend," he says.

"Your what now?" I exclaim in surprise.

Now, let's move on to tense. You tend to fluctuate from past to present tense, when really, you need to stick to one. For example:

"Oh really?" he says. [says = present tense]