Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35949526-20180621220502/@comment-35711173-20180622085524

Hi,

Yes, you do have a lot of grammar errors.

http://www.grammarly.com is a web site that does grammar checks. If you just use this and correct the errors that it indicates your story will be FAR improved. I also use https://www.scribens.com/

Grammarly does a pretty good basic check for free but they want you to hand over like $12/month for their advanced usage - i.e. all the really good checking. However, if you fix it up with the free grammarly and scribens first then the number of errors is small enough that you can do a little trick.

After all the basic scrubbing, paste into Grammarly your story one paragraph at a time. It will say that there are perhaps six advanced errors in the paragraph and probably will break them down. By cutting half the paragraph out and then pasting it back and cutting out the other half you can generally locate the errors. Often I get down to working with individual sentences.

This approach takes a couple of hours to do right but it has another very big payoff. You get to look at each part of the story very isolated from the rest. You should use this to decide if each and every sentence drives the story forward or not. If it doesn't then delete it. There are times when Grammarly makes mistakes, but it's right more than 95% of the time.

Each story is a chance to improve. My first story was taken down by the Admins and they said it was hopeless. A real ego boost. :-( But I came back and have three stories on the site which ... haven't been taken down yet.

You get some REALLY good advice here. Listen to it.

I want you to think of something. HOW does this character evade capture? If there was someone running around stabbing people, the odds are extremely good they will be captured. If they are only killing in the town of Peckerwood then this person is doing something extraordinary or has become something non-human to avoid capture. So what is it and how did they become that? Does that add to your story?

DrBobSmith (talk) 08:55, June 22, 2018 (UTC)