Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-23872426-20170819024924/@comment-23872426-20170819031240

EmpyrealInvective wrote: Thanks for reading our quality standards, before messaging me. That being said, your story was deleted for failing to meet our standards for the reasons outlined below:

Starting with the basics, upon initial viewing, your story was a wall of text when I began reading it. You did correct the issue later, but you still left a majority of your paragraphs indented which causes white box errors and makes text unreadable.

Capitalization: "Stan noticed too. “Are you okay?” He (he) asked immediately." (dialogue tags do not need capitalization), " This was starting too (sic) look like some shit straight out of the X-Files So (so) instead we just drove to the nearest police station, and reluctantly told them everything that happened.", etc.

Punctuation: "When she got in(comma missing) I finally got a good look at her, and that only added to the strangeness.", "she simply replied, “I just want to go home,”. (punctuation is not needed outside of quotations) Fair enough", etc.

Wording issues: "Had (I) known what was going to happen next I probably would have just drove off.", "Turtlenecks and skirts aren’t really all the rage these days, especially ones covered in holes. (awkwardly worded)", "Threatened, she said she rain (ran), and lost him in the fog", "I stopped the car, and Stand (Stan) and I searched my entire vehicle for her.", "Our first instance (instinct) was to call the police, to no avail(comma missing) our phones were dead in spite of having a full charge just minutes ago.", etc.

Story issues: "It was just about a year ago, that I learned the hard way why you never pick up strangers." The opening feels abrupt. It almost comes across like it's missing an introduction that eases the readers into the story. (More on the premise later).

Story issues cont.: "At the first mention of the police station she immediately gunned it down. (I'm not really sure what you're implying here. The only instances of the phrasing, "gun it down" I've heard always implies gunfire. Being more specific might help clear up the story and help it be more effective.)"

Story issues end: Unfortunately, this is a story that's been told on multiple occasions (it also happened to be an early episode of Supernatural so that tends to detract from its effectiveness.) I actually can recall a number of creepypastas that tell this story more-or-less (adding and subtracting a few details) on this site, which really robs the story of its effectiveness. I'm sorry, but there are quite a lot of issues here, compound that with a story that has been told a number of times and you have something that doesn't meteor quality standards. EmpyrealInvective (talk) 03:08, August 19, 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing all that up. And it's all good man, it was good writing practice anyway.