Essie's Critiques

The One Who Stole From A Witch's Garden (2) | Crystal_Winter_

Another problem is your apostrophes. I've noticed this mistake to be frequent throughout your chapters. You have apostrophes on unnecessary words, such as "see's" and "tree's." Make sure to go thoroughly through your chapters and correct these.

I've also noticed an excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. You either have a long list of words, such as "red, green, purple, yellow, and hints of gold in the sky..." These descriptions contain way too many adjectives, and should be shortened to at most three. Along with that, I suggest instead of using an adverb (a word describing a verb) to cushion a weak verb, use a stronger verb to replace both. For example, "She ran quickly" is weak. A better alternative to tighten the sentence would be: "She sprinted."

Lastly, your use of commas attracted my attention. You often string together many clauses that end up being two paragraphs long. I suggest ending a sentence and starting another, instead of putting them all in one long sentence. Along with that, you're often missing commas. Keep in mind that the basic rule of using commas is that they separate the several "topics" of your sentence. For example, we have the sentence, "She gasped tears filling her eyes." We have two clauses or "topics" here. One is that she gasped. The second is that tears filled her eyes. In order to not confuse your readers, you need to separate the two. Correction: "She gasped, tears filling her eyes."

YOUR SPELLING ERRORS: (5/5) Excellent job here! I didn't find any spelling errors here. Then again, I was sitting for about five hours doing this, so I probably missed something. If you don't already, I suggest using ProWritingAid. It's the perfect writing site to help you catch your spelling errors and grammar errors. Along with that, it'll help you restructure your sentences and separate them into more clear phrases.

YOUR PLOT: (11/20) You are definitely on the right track, twisting the tale of Rapunzel with your own ideas and turning it into your own. There weren't as many distractions as before, but there was still a lot of unnecessary background information here. Remember that background information should only be presented when the situation calls for it. When a girl's mother dies, then would be a good time to describe her relationship with her mother in detail. Only describe the background when called for, or else your reader will most likely skip it.

YOUR CHARACTERS: (6/10) I didn't get a lot of personality from your characters. I didn't really get to connect with your characters in the personality department. What are they like, really? What flaws do they have? I felt very disconnected here. What skills will they acquire? These are all important things that the reader will want to know in order to build a strong connection to your characters. This is definitely all an improvement from when I first reviewed your characters, but you have so much unnecessary prose that it's hard to focus here.

YOUR VOICE: (10/20) What's unique about your writing is that you have such a unique writing voice. You have gorgeous prose and vivid descriptions. The main problem here is that you have too many of them. I've read you describing the trees at least four times while reading your story so far. If you describe it once, you don't need to describe it again. Along with that, you tend to ramble and write really long sentences. This makes it hard for your readers to understand your writing, so I suggest focusing on really shortening/tightening your sentences and be more straight-forward here.

STORY FLOW: (2/5) Your transitions here were much more smooth, and I could see each thing leading towards the main plot of your story. There was still a lot of unnecessary information and sudden transitions, however. It looks like you struggled at times to move a scene along, and often used words such as "then," and "soon." Try to incorporate smoother transitions. This will improve as you continue to write.

So, now that the grading/feedback is over, let's turn the focus to each individual chapter.