Sapphire's Review Store 2.0

Review by Sunshine: Anamnesis

Title: Anamnesis

Author: Malak--

Summary: [no score – will not be added to final score]

I've decided not to score the summary because you've chosen not to go with a traditional summary, which is totally fine. In fact, it has a lot of intriguing elements and raises a lot of questions even without introducing the protagonist, conflicts and stakes. So, well done, nonetheless.

Just be wary: make sure your summary is polished. Beware of the correct usage of contractions, be aware of where you should capitalise your words, and make sure all your sentences end with full-stops. I won't discuss them too much here, because that's all in the next section below! 

Grammar: 2/5

Overall, your grammar definitely needs some work – but don't worry, I'll go through a few of them in detail.

The biggest error I found was throughout your dialogue. 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:

"Sweetheart you were involved in a car accident" my mum explained moving her hand over my shoulder trying to sooth me, but it wasn't "You've been in a coma for the past two months."

In that above example, you are missing punctuation before the closing inverted commas. Secondly, you are also missing commas that make the sentence cohesive. You're missing a fill-stop at the end of a sentence before the next set of dialogue, and you have a run-on sentence. It should be:

"Sweetheart, you were involved in a car accident," my mum explained, moving her hand over my shoulder. If she was trying to soothe me, it wasn't working. "You've been in a coma for the past two months."

Speaking of run-on sentences, you have a lot of them. You also have some words that start with capital letters even if they are not a proper noun or at the start of the sentence. Additionally, you have lots of sentences missing full-stops at the end, and some of your proper nouns are lacking capitalisation. I suggest revising those.

Also, look out for contractions. For example:

"Maybe its meant to be there."

Since you are trying to write the contracted form of 'maybe it is meant to be there', you need an apostrophe to indicate it is a contraction. It should be:

"Maybe it's meant to be there."

Another example:

"Shut up or ill end this shit."

It should be:

"Shut up or I'll end this shit."

Additionally, you need to look out for tenses. Every now and then, you'll fluctuate from past tense to present tense – sometimes within one paragraph. For example:

Leo called and texted, and so did Xander. I like the fact that they care about me.

If we break it down, it looks like:

Leo called and texted... [called/texted = past tense]

I like the fact... [like = present tense]