Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-8912691-20150126191232/@comment-26007602-20150127054739

Hmmm. The story itself seems rather sound, albeit a little long. It's generally frowned upon to start a story with a newspaper article, although perhaps since the character's a reporter, that would be forgiven. There needs to be a better transmission from article to Mary however, because it currently is a bit messy. I'm also not sure why there's a contents bar at the top separating the story; if it's a formatting error, then it can be fixed. If it was intentional, I'd get rid of it.

I'm not completely sure on the wiki's policy about using characters like Jack the Ripper. It may violate a spin-off policy, but since it's about a historical character, I'm not sure if it matters.

As I mentioned the story itself wasn't that bad. I do think you could definitely cut down on the extraneous details though. The character descriptions (except for Jack) are somewhat unnecessary. Mary's whole conflict with her boss seems a bit cliché and unimportant to the story. You could cut it or not without affecting the story very much. I do think you need to elaborate more on the cycle though; one line just doesn't really do it for me. There should be a reason other than "because".

Also, Jack murdered prostitutes, so the killings aren't that similar. That's more of a nitpicky issue though.

No I think the reason it got deleted was for two things. One, you could definitely go about breaking up some of those longer paragraphs. It makes it much easier for the reader to actually read and looks better over all. The main issue I saw, was that this story is littered with run-on sentences. Here are a few examples:

"Whoever or whatever is responsible for these murders must be The Ripper, how he’s managed to remain alive for so long I can’t explain only that he has been wandering the world, God knows how long, repeating the Whitechapel murders for some reason."

Could be changed to: "Whoever or whatever is responsible for these murders must be (t)he Ripper(.) How he’s managed to remain alive for so long I can’t explain only that he has been wandering the world, God knows how long, repeating the Whitechapel murders for some reason."

"On the walls hung several paintings that Mary recognized as copies of famous works by Michelangelo, they both walked past the hallway into what was apparently Samuel’s living room which was also covered in copies of famous paintings."

Could be changed to: "On the walls hung several paintings that Mary recognized as copies of famous works by Michelangelo(.) (Samuel and Mary) walked past the hallway into what was (delete "apparently") Samuel’s living room. (It too, was) covered in copies of famous paintings.

"That first week of spending time with Ward resulted in mixed outcome and was filled with arguments between the two, still extremely skeptical of Ward’s theory and yet fascinated by it as well Mary argued with Samuel most the time as the investigation pressed on."

Could be changed to: "That first week of spending time with Ward resulted in (a) mixed outcome filled with arguments between the two(.) (Mary was) still extremely skeptical of Ward’s theory and yet fascinated by it as well(.)  (She) argued with Samuel most the time as the investigation pressed on."

Do you see the sentence issues here? Those were a few I chose by random. I don't think the story is bad, but you really need to rewrite these constant run on sentences, as the story is awkward to read and has a poor flow as a result. Try reading it out loud if you can't spot the mistakes; that should make them easier to find.