Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29270351-20160610104449/@comment-28266772-20160610135729

Hi

This is a big improvement over your last work. You're showing great progress. The main issues are no longer thngs like spelling, but instead awkward wording. I would love if someone else could perhaps offer insight as I'm struggling to identify a single, consistent problem, but I'll try to outline what I see anyway. I'll also offer a full annotated version of your story, because I happen to have enough free time to do so.

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My grandmother was once a head nurse in a hospital. She told me and my siblings stories of the emergencies she took care of, the people she met, and such. [We find it very entertaining and sometimes very creepy. This is what we find, personally, the eeriest.] -> This last sentence should be in the past tense.

My grandmother, Lauren, started her morning shift at about 2:00 AM. Lauren [her name becomes repetitive around here, perhaps say "she"] received a call from a friend, Jamie, who happened to be a head nurse as well, since there was a serious emergency. -> this last sentence is fragmented. You should find a better way of establishing that her friend is the head nurse (it doesn't need to be said in so many words, you could just say " from a friend, Jamie the head nurse, since there etc.")

 She was asked to go to Room 328 to check on a patient. When grandma inquired from Jamie of the patient's sickness, she replied, "I have seen nothing like this before, demonic." -> The phrase "inquired from Jamie of" is incorrect. You could say "inquired about the patient", or "asked Jamie about the patient", or any other variation, but the exact wording you use here doesn't quite work.

Lauren was agitated since she looked up to Jamie as an expert when it comes [should be 'came'] to classifying sicknesses or disorders. When they were still in nursing school, they were classmates, and Jamie was the class valedictorian. She couldn't believe that, ([for being]-> this particular phrase is incorrect here. You could substitute it with 'as' or 'despite being') a head nurse, Jamie could not ([be able to] -> this is unnecessary) medically describe the disease.

Lauren quickly went to Room 328. She saw a [you need something here to tell the audience who is talking] "naked woman, anorexic, having black corneas, white hair, and a skin so stretched, you could see the bones." This is a run-on sentence. This means that the statements used to compose this sentence are not connected properly. You also use the wrong tense for 'having black corneas', and incorrectly prefix "skin" with "a". Barring a few exceptions skin is always just treated as a plural in English, and does not need the indefinite article 'a'. An example of one way this sentence could be written is "naked, anorexic, woman with black corneas and white hair, and skin so stretched you could see the bones.". Another example is, "naked woman, anorexic, with black corneas, white hair, and skin so stretched you could see the bones". Either way you need to fix each statement to the last with some type of conjunction (with, and, but, etc.) or punctuation (not just a list of commas).

Immediately when the patient noticed her presence, the patient [repetition of 'the patient'] screamed and chanted in different languages. She vomited a red-orange mixture of ooze and some fragments of metal. "Except for the patient wrist tag, she is [was] completely naked", Lauren added. [this doesn't really work because Lauren isn't adding to a previous segment of speech. You should probably just say, "Lauren said"]

She was Hepzibah Cadell, she was 64 years old. She was brought in by a nurse that was just taking a lunch break outside the hospital when she noticed Cadell walking around the street, limp [limp should either be an adverb, or should be placed more appropriately in the sentence]. The nurse asked her name, and quickly brought her inside the said [don't need to say "said"] hospital.

Cadell was put [in]to her hospital bed, when she started to shake uncontrollably and scream. She was restrained eventually, but Cadell furiously attacked the assistants who helped restrain her. She was said to have bitten most of them angrily. A nurse tried to sedate her, and Cadell ended her life by biting her head, losing parts ->[this makes it sound like it's Cadell who loses her brain] of the brain. That's when Jaime called Lauren.

Lauren figured that if she would [I think this should be 'could'] kill the patient, she would put a stop to her killing more people. She took it as a coup de grace and took out a pair of medical scissors. Before she could stab her, Cadell screamed very loud[ly], that enabled the other medical personnel, including her, in the room to drop their hand-held materials, which includes [included] grandma's scissors. -> The last bit is worded incorrectly. Instead of enabled perhaps it should be 'forced'. Either way when you enable something, you're essentially helping them, so in this case it doesn't make sense. 'Hand-held materials' is also a mouthful, there are much easier ways to say the same thing.

Cadell disappeared and left blood stains on the wall, forming letters that said, "I will return." The next day, when our grandma returned [you've repeated 'return' here, breaking the flow] to her old home, her bed was soaking with blood and the red-orange vomit which I said before [don't need to remind us that you mentioned it]. She prayed the Rosary that night, being a Catholic [This 'being a Catholic' bit should be at the start]. She told me that Cadell never stopped haunting her ever since.

So overall a lot of run-on sentences. I would recommend reading the guide on this wikia about run-on sentences. These guides will help a lot,

 http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki:Style_Guide_for_Writing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-on_sentence

They should help clarify sentence structure.

Moving onto story structure I feel like this would be improved by building up more mood and atmosphere. It's quick, which I like, but it's also paced strangely. It starts with the woman going to see the possessed woman, but then stops to explain how she got there, before then resuming the main story. It could use just a bit more detail to be effective. For example you mention the woman vomiting up metal - that's a great example of how detail can be scary, it's a great little touch. But unfortunately there aren't a lot of these touches. I felt like the metal, and vomit, were pretty much the only parts of the story that were actually scary.

I terms of story content I think you would benefit from making it less cliched. The blood writing isn't very original, or interesting. You don't do much to distinguish this story from other tales of possession. And, also, the way the grandmother just moves straight towards killing the possessed woman is a bit rushed, and not very believable.

<p style="margin-bottom:0px!important;">Overall though you've made massive progress since your last story, which in turn was also a huge improvement over the one before it. Writing can be very frustrating, and the English language is tough to write in. I don't want you to be discouraged by my feedback, which has focused a lot on the negative, because it's just a necessary part of learning to write well and I recommend that you persist and keep trying because you're improving very quickly. I think you've clearly made an effort to get better and incorporate my previous feedback, and the last thing I would want is for it to seem like I'm trying to discourage you. It's an important process to go through this cycle of feedback and submission, and it's not something you'll have to do for very long if you continue to improve at this rate.