Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31498791-20181130120708/@comment-35711173-20181130160829

Thedarkflintstone,

You should be proofing your work for spelling, grammar and punctuation before submitting it here.

You compose in MS Word 2010. That has basic spell checking and grammar checking. You should be using it, but I am sure you have noted its deficiencies by now.

Once you have your story composed, proofread it. Look for mistakes. You will have them. Read it out loud. Take this time to go through the story and edit out parts that really aren't necessary. Be ruthless. If it doesn't drive the Pasta forward then delete it.

Use free online grammar checking websites. I recommend http://www.grammarly.com and https://www.scribens.com. Use them both. They find different errors.

https://www.scribens.com is great for detecting many errors, especially run on sentences. However, it can eat words. I strongly suggest correcting your story in your word processor and then copy/pasting your revised draft in with www.scribens.com.

Grammarly has "Premium" alerts. Getting those costs major bucks. However, you can get the benefit of those alerts for free. Paste your story one paragraph at a time into Grammarly. If there are premium alerts in the paragraph, try to fix them when possible. Sometimes the suggested correction is wrong but 95% of the time I find it correct.

Try https://prowritingaid.com as well. It detects many issues. Unfortunately, the free version only lets you work with 500 words at a time. I just analyze a few paragraphs at a time.

If needed, delete part of that one paragraph to find what sentence the error is in. Sometimes you have to even delete part of a sentence. While you are reviewing your story one paragraph at a time, consider whether the paragraph is even necessary. Check each sentence in the paragraph. Does that drive the pasta forward? If it doesn't, delete it.

Correct your Word/OpenOffice Writer copy as you go. Make sure that is as clean as possible.

Occasionally, Grammarly makes mistakes. However, it is right more than 95% of the time. I would try to get to only 5% of the number of errors you had initially.

If you go to this point with your story, you will get far better reception of it in the Writer's Workshop.

https://www.slickwrite.com is great for telling you when start sentences with the same word in the same paragraph. This makes the language more interesting.

As for your story, it is boring. It's a diary entry of someone we don't know and don't care about. We have the wrapper story that some librarian is looking at notes from a long time ago from people who found out that they are in some sort of domed off simulation of time periods.

You have a framing story around a framing story around a framing story. It's not personal and it's not interesting.

I suggest pulling into the guy running around in Roman times. See it from his standpoint.

As another issue, your view of Roman times doesn't seem correct historically. I know it's not really Rome, but it still clashes and further shatters suspension of disbelief.

So, what happens that's of interest here? Some teenager finds out that there are mysterious tunnels and goes down one. The story cuts off as he is about to go up a different one. We don't really care.