Assignment 1

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. Ernest Hemingway

Hi! I’m reviewing your work, Doomsayer, as a student of the Rockin’ Review Academy.

Good writing requires re-viewing and revising. I think it’s realistic to conclude you can only review as well as you can write. In many cases, I may benefit more from reviewing than the writer being reviewed. Please consider the following review as my humble attempt as a fledgling writer to help other writers in the pursuit of their art.

Kudos
I think you did an excellent job of giving just enough description for the reader to have a clear picture of  your main character Cooley. This is also true for your description of the storm. I thought the pacing of your story allowed you effectively to build up the suspense—I was prepared for a major disaster.

Although you didn’t give any description of the mayor, I envisioned him with a really bad comb-over! I didn’t like him at all, especially when he mocked Cooley. Sure, he was brave and cocky once he came out of his hiding place. So if you wanted to elicit this reaction from your reader, you were successful with me.

Favorite Part
I really liked this scene: ”…Jason thought he saw Cooley, the only person untouched by the hail, dancing in the middle of the street and laughing.”

Nuts‘n Bolts (i.e. spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar etc.)
You had several run-on sentences. In the 5th paragraph: “Cooley now hoisted his sign and…” and “Black clouds wisped away and…”

I catch myself missing these kinds of errors too: “a chill last day of October…” & “Everyone howled (with) laughter.”  It is very difficult to catch these types of errors, but they’re fairly easy to correct once someone points them out to you.

I would insert a period and make these 2 sentences: “Wow Cooley, you came close this year. Thanks for…”

In the very next sentence, you wrote “clouds roiled up”—very nice choice in verbs, by the way, but the next verb was in present tense. So it should be “swallowed.”

Suggestions
I’d like to suggest you look critically at every “and” in your story with an idea of revising your sentence structure either to eliminate the need for a conjunction or to substitute another for “and.” I think this will improve the flow of your story. I find it helps if you read your story out loud.

I hope this has been helpful in some way. If you think some of my suggestions are worth trying, just let me know if you’d like for me to read any revisions.

Keep creating interesting characters.
Meg

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