Player Comments on The three weeks from earth

Okay, so clearly some effort went into this, I can tell that from the sheer amount of words. This seems to be a story you enjoyed writing. That's great!

What's less good is the terrible, terrible punctuation and grammar, which seems to be brought on by a complete lack of proofreading.

The very first sentence:

'Your name is Kathleen Abernathy,he's are fourteen years old,when you left to leave for Utah,your mother almost forgot to give you your inhaler.'

I know proofreading can be difficult in a longer work, it's easy to miss things, but I don't think it's expecting a lot for the author to read and correct the very first sentence of their story. And the rest of the issues are so persistent and glaring throughout the entire thing.

Could have used a few more choices, but, first thing's first: please take this down and spend some time editing and cleaning it up before publishing again.

I hate to see a story by someone who clearly has an imagination and enjoys writing wind up not even being read or with a one way trip to the site's dumpster just over something so basic.

At first, from your story, I thought you might be quite young. For this reason, I thought I'd write a slightly nicer comment. Then, as I read more of the story, some of the plot and jokes made me think that you're probably old enough to accept criticism. Here we go:
-The grammar, structure, and everything about the writing is the most glaringly obvious fault of this story. At least it's kind of consistently bad though. E.E. Cummings would be proud, but seeing as the rest of us generally follow fairly set guidelines on grammar and punctuation, I'd suggest you follow suit. There is at least one example on every page of incorrect syntax, and one on almost every line. The dialogue is also incredibly hard to believe. Here are but a handful of examples:
- '"Y-you don't know and you don't wanna know,it's about my Father on what happen?"Esther says.
"Wh-what."Samuel asks.' I Have to agree with Samuel here. What!? This sentence doesn't make sense; is Esther asking a question? Why is the tense in the present? Just make sure you read over the whole thing before publishing, and try not to switch tenses and perspectives (I noticed a lot of 'we blah blah', then 'you blah blah'). I suggest you unpublish this, revise it thoroughly, and then republish if you really want this to be out there. Seeing as it's over 10000 words, I can tell you've put time and effort in, but just a bit more on the proof reading front and it might bump this above the 3/8 mark.
- '"...but Amanda was a nice girl,it was really a shame that we found her brutally murdered in the hallway,I don't get why this happened,she was a very nice person..."' The most noticeable thing is how you use punctuation. After you use a comma (,) and a full stop, or 'period' if you're American, which is this (.), then you need a space. It stops everything from flowing into one mess and makes the story a lot nicer to read and is vital in decent spacing within the dialogue and story. This all contributes to make it more believable. Also, I can't imagine anyone saying this about their murdered friend.
- '"Wow now I'm not going to sleep tonight,my name is Jaime Headen."he introduces.' Just read all the dialogue out loud and think if it sounds natural. This helps me and I know it helps loads of people. If you're really invested, sit down and write small profiles for each character, decide how they'd act and talk, and try to consider all of that when reviewing their dialogue. This example doesn't sound realistic, because nobody would just come up to a group of people after seeing something horrific and say that they're not going to sleep, then say their full name. Also, this is an example of a comma splice. It's a common mistake, but an important one. This is where you join two main clauses, sentences which can stand alone and make sense by themselves, with a comma (,). You can use a full stop to separate them, or a semi-colon (;), or the word 'and', or a few other techniques to space it properly. Look it up if you're not sure what a comma splice is and try to think about whether you're joining main clauses with commas. I saw quite a few of these.
- '"Screw my Dad!"Esther says [after explaining how her dad raped her] not caring.
"You already did."Samuel says.' Jesus, this took a dark turn! Who would actually make a joke like that after finding out someone's dad raped them? Unless Samuel is supposed to be an incredibly insensitive asshole, which he may be, I can't see anyone saying anything like this. It was probably you trying to fit in some humour, but I just don't think it works and nobody seems to care about the comment in the rest of the group beyond a small jab to the ribs. It's best not to compromise your characters for the sake of a few jokes in a serious story. I also found it generally pretty crude, but that's my opinion. Another thing relating to this: you didn't really need the flashback later on. By 'later on', I mean the reader literally found out about the family abuse a couple of paragraphs previous to the flashback. It doesn't really work if you explicitly say 'flashback' in the text. Personally, I'm not a fan of flashbacks unless they reveal something the reader doesn't know, and even then they're a bit corny. If you're deadset on using them, put it in italics or something.
- '"911 what's your emergency.?"The lady says.
"(Hoarsely)Please!Help....us,my s-son's in trouble."Mrs.Sanders reports.
"Ma'am I think you need water?The Lady says.' Again, very unrealistic. Someone trained to deal with emergencies wouldn't worry about something as trivial as that. Also, remember to put a space after the dialogue ends, don't mix full stops with exclamation marks (!) or questions marks (?), and use a comma and lowercase letters when moving from the end of dialogue to the part that explains who says the dialogue and how they say it.
- '"An infant child,but we're 400 thousand km away from earth how did he get here?"Samuel says startled.' Nobody would say 'an infant child' at the age of 14 or whatever, if ever.
Right, there are some other examples outside of dialogue I'd like to mention.
-'(Sorry for the lack of choices)' and '(Sorry for the skip)' are two things I came across. In a serious story, you can't break character and perspective and apologise for this stuff. If you're actually sorry, go ahead and address those issues instead of just saying it.
- One last minor point is that it's not really explained why you have 'The Rise', if people have other powers, and what the cause of them is.
-'Everyone there shakes they're head no.' Watch out for 'there', 'their' and 'they're'. In this case, I'd suggest a sentence more like: 'The others all shake their heads.' Some things are best left unsaid: the fact that they mean 'no' is a given as long as you're vaguely aware of human customs.
This really needs a lot more effort and could be decent with it. I'd suggest reading a lot more to get a feel for syntax.
2/8

Asayuna, I think you mean: 'Okay, so there should've been less punctuation in the story. I didn't want the sentences to be run ons.'

It's not that there was too much punctuation, it's that it's not being used correctly, and this in combination with the poor grammar.

If you're having trouble identifying what the issues even are, I recommend browsing the Grammarly site (link is in my profile) and simply reading more books. You can pick up a lot that way just through osmosis, and you should be able to read a page of a book and then a page of your story (out loud if it helps) and tell where your grammar sounds awkward and off.

Okay,the story had grammar problems,and it's not a bad story,but the messed up thing was that you made it the end on January 1st and the parents kids are dead.This work is pretty good tho.

But I rate this story 5/8 it's good but the grammar is out of wack,best for you to fix them up.

Okay so there should've been less Punctuation in the story,I didn't want the sentences to be run on's.

I can tell that there was some serious passion and spark behind this story. Obviously some planning and a big plan in the works. This could've been an excellent narrative, but the grammar and punctuation mistakes kind of drew away from the excitement and turned it into a more I'm-just-going-to-bear-with-this type story. While reading it, I kind of got bored. It could have used more suspense and more detail work.

Also, some massive behind-the-scenes development work could have helped make it better. It seemed linear and got me bored really fast. Overall, I would say good job, but always aim to improve. There is plenty of stuff you could work on, so let's get to work! We're all here to help.