Talk:The "Giver" Experiment/@comment-28266772-20160622154253

I enjoyed aspects of this but it's really let down by formatting issues, and a lack of clarity. For a starters, I had to google 'The Giver' to get even a jist of what the experiment was going to be about. Also who is narrating this story? It switches from a generic narration at the start, to a strange account of the experiment, and finally to the words of the documentary maker. You should either format a story as a diary, or as a narrative, and if you do you switch should format it correctly and not just leave more than one line between paragraphs. Each section should be clear with regards to what it is meant to be. The section detailing the experiments feels as though it is attempting to be an official record of what is happening, but it makes absolutely no reference to any scientific/psychological principles nor does it feel, in any way, like an official record. But if it's meant to be a generic narration then the need for it to be distinct from the first section, and worded so awkwardly, is completely unnecessary.

Other issues:

You have frequent tense issues e.g. "how it goes" is present tense, even though the rest of the story is past tense. "He would be observed" is also in the conditional tense.

There are also grammatical errors. e.g. "Two families begun" begun is the past participle of 'to begin'. In other words it should either be "Two families began" or "two families had begun". "Eviction Room" - you should only capitalize proper nouns.

There are also wording issues. e.g "more frequent emotional swings" - more is a relative term, and in this example has nothing to relate to. In other words, more frequent than what? I think you mean, "increasingly frequent...", or you should clarify, 'more than what was happening previously'.

Overall: This needs a thorough proof read, and needs to be formatted correctly. The story is great at conjuring atmosphere, I like that, but it's simply too poorly structured to be effective. It's no good conjuring up a scary atmosphere if you haven't even made it clear what it is we should be afraid of. You don't even outline the basics of the experiment. In fact, as far as I can tell, the basic premise of this is "there is an experiment, and people go mad", which is neither original, nor interesting.

Finally: if you want feedback you should post your story to the writer's workshop, and not just post it on the wikia.