Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28299494-20160609140627/@comment-28266772-20160609143412

There's a lot of errors here that put it below the quality standards for the site, and importantly one of the rules for this wikia is that there are no spinoffs from currently established pastas i.e. the rake, slenderman, etc.

I've taken one of the paragraphs below and annotated it for grammatical and spelling mistakes too. It would be good to bear the following in mind when writing any future stories.

What happened during that Night at camp? -> improper capitalization of night.

This is a question that I am often asked, it’s sort of a big deal. So you’re going to be the second person that I tell. It was just a normal night at scout camp at 12:00 am. -> all of this is awkwardly worded. You make it seem like it's an informal spoken word story, but you say things like '12:00am' when most people would just say midnight.

My friends and I were playing soccer, when our leader told us we needed to come back to our site for lights out, basically a scout term for it’s time to go to sleep. We followed him along the trail, but we heard something. “What was that, Jason,” puzzled Spencer -> You should have a question mark after Jason, and you should use a line break when someone start to speak. At the very least there should be a full stop after 'Spencer' so we don't immediately assume the next sentence is spoken by the same person.

“I don’t know, should we check it out?” asked Jason. “No we need to listen to our leader and head back, we could get lost,” I objected.

“Come on John, what’s the matter. To chicken,” Spencer teased. -> 'To' should be 'too' and there should be a question mark after chicken.

The thing with Jason and Spencer is they’ve always been mischievous people. They’ve almost gotten themselves killed in many instances just to impress. -> this is awkwardly worded

”Fine,” I said,” we’ll go look for a little bit but then we need to head back.”  So we went into the forest, I thankfully had a flashlight to light the way as it’s basically pitch black out here at this time. -> tense issues.

So grammatically there's a lot of issues with capitalization, spelling, and missing punctuation marks. In terms of awkward wording you frequently change tense which makes the story hard to read. You should, as a general rule, write in the past tense. For example when you say "it's basically pitch black out here at this time" it is confusing for the reader as it could mean either the night the story is set, or the the narrator's current location. Another example is " The thing with Jason and Spencer is they’ve always been mischievous people" which is problematic, because Jason and Spencer die in your story. So they're not anything other than dead when using the present tense.

Other issues with wording is that you have this peculiar tendency to litter dialogue with the character's names. It becomes repetitive, awkward, and unrealistic. These kids are constantly calling each other James, John and Spencer, when most people wouldn't include a name every time they spoke to a friend. This also leads to a repetition like, " asked Spencer. “Yeah Spencer,"

<span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">In terms of story you don't let us know enough about the setting. You start out by telling us the scout master has contacted these kids, but then they run for miles and miles without finding him. You should begin by telling the audience the establishing info which is relevant to the story. This means we should know how close to safety the children are. Finally, the ending is very rough and not very believable. Why is Jason burned alive and not just torn apart? Why does he wait so long to say what he heard? Why does the protagonist survive and no one else? How old are the kids? Where is it set? Why did only Jason hear what was said?

<span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">Also I know this has been a particularly harsh set of feedback, but this is quite below quality standards and these are important issues if you'd like to improve as a writer. I'm sure others will post and offer more feedback as well. It can be quite discouraging to get negative feedback, but everyone has to learn and it's not a bad thing. Ultimately it's good because it'll help you get better. If there's anything you're curious about there's loads of style guides and advice blogs on this site I'd recommend reading. And if you reply to my comment I'd happily elaborate on any of my points.

<span style="color:rgb(212,212,213);font-size:14px;font-weight:normal;line-height:22px;">Best of luck.