Jerk Reviews - Closed

10_Twisted Minds

Review of Twisted Minds by Patricia_Tina25

Introduction

Although this work is an interesting concept, it appears that in the author's eagerness to share, they have neglected editing and ensuring their narrative is clear for readers. The most overwhelming issues are a lack of copy editing and weak characterization. These issues compound to make the overall narrative confusing.

There are issues with paragraphing, misspellings, clarity issues, and problems with basic writing that simply prevent readers from being drawn into the story. And while some reviewers feel the author is sometimes decent with physical descriptors, this is not enough to overcome the issues with the piece.

Grammar, Syntax, and General Editing

When it comes to the topic of editing, the lack of spacing between paragraphs and dialogue is distracting and makes the writing difficult to follow. The narrative is difficult to read the way it's currently presented and the addition of spaces where they're not necessary led to frustration on the part of the readers. These issues leave the work looking unpolished, which undoubtedly colors how readers receive the work.

To that end, direct thoughts should be italicized for the sake of clarity and for third person POV, using the perspective tag as the chapter titles is unnecessary. Some reviewers feel it might be better if the author just numbered the chapters or came up with a unique name for each of the chapters rather than titling each chapter by the character's name whose perspective the chapter is written from.

Even if the work was properly spaced out, glaring grammatical errors prevent the work from being presented successfully. These aren't the complex grammatical errors that many people miss. Rather, the errors reviewers noticed were quite basic in nature . For instance, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, the character says, "Their scared of me." It should read, "They're scared of me."

Later in the chapter, the author begins a new paragraph in the middle of a sentence, leaving a lowercase 'i' floating next to the left hand margin. It is highly recommended that the author begin the editing process by going into the document and spacing properly.

These basic grammatical errors appear throughout the work. Take a look a this sentence from just the prologue, "Not only do we have the beasts on out asses we have Argo..." In this example, "out" should very clearly be "our."

Take this example from the first chapter: "I thought so too, but i could not think of a reason why..." Capitalizing 'i' when it stands alone in a sentence is a basic convention of writing, and errors such as this make it incredibly difficult to focus on the narrative of the piece. As a rule of thumb, when it comes to editing, some reviewers edit for twice as long as it took to write their work. Additionally, perhaps editing from the bottom up rather than the top down will help the author notice errors that they may normally miss.

The writer struggles with the correct usage of the english language. On the topic of syntax, some words were used incorrectly or oddly. Such as, the use of "simper" to mean "crooked" was off putting. Another example is when the the author writes 'land bombs' rather than 'landmines,' 'swarming' rather than 'swimming,' etc. Also, how does one have "ivory red hair"? (Chapter 1, "Thomas"). Ivory is a cream color, not red. Perhaps the author meant she has ivory skin and red hair? Also, a "craving dog" isn't an appropriate idiom in the english language. Of course, this could be an attempt at literary creativity, yet the odd word choice hurts the piece removing the reader from the world you are trying to immerse them into..

In essence, there appears to be no editing done on this piece and the numerous errors ('their' rather than 'they're,' 'signed' rather than 'sighed,' 'innocents man,' 'man' rather than 'men,' 'sniper' rather than 'sniper rifle,' 'they ways were,' etc.) dramatically affect the impact and clarity of the piece. Even issues with name spelling such as the woman's name being spelled Carry rather than 'Kerry,' 'Kerri,' or 'Carey,' which are the typical spellings of the name rather than the verb 'carry' is problematic. The author should consider doing a round of editing to at least catch mistakes such as spelling and capitalization.