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Thread: Want a lazy review of your writing?

  1. #11
    Now Clickable AwsonRew's Avatar
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    This is an incomplete WOTM entry. I've been wanting a review of the piece and the format for a while. I just never got around to asking anyone. I'd like to know how it turned out so I can decide how to approach the next one.

    If you love me, you'd could put a little extra ass into the review. Also do that if you hate me.


  2. #12
    Forever a BBEG Hellis's Avatar
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    You know what, this could be fun.


    made by the ever charming and talented Lillian Thorne.

  3. #13
    Mrow ^.^ WereCat's Avatar
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    I'm writing two monologue assignments for my Writerscraft class tonight. EDIT THEM FOR ME SPAM!




  4. #14
    Magnificent Bastard Jorick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by AwsonRew View Post
    This is an incomplete WOTM entry. I've been wanting a review of the piece and the format for a while. I just never got around to asking anyone. I'd like to know how it turned out so I can decide how to approach the next one.

    If you love me, you'd could put a little extra ass into the review. Also do that if you hate me.

    Disclaimer: I'm not poetry expert. I'd like to think I know more about the mechanics of what a poem should aim for than the average person, but I also tend not to like poetry much and thus don't go out of my way to read it. Take this all with a grain of salt, because I could be talking out of my ass due to ignorance about poetry.

    Disclaimer 2: I also sort of lied in the title. Lazy reviews? lolnope

    I can see why you'd want a review of the format. I'll say right off the bat that the larger text size for yelling is bad and distracting. That's a cheap gimmick to attempt to increase the emotional weight of the yelled lines, give them volume by size rather than by content and phrasing. The different font for speech is fine, but I think your choice of fonts here was bad. You should aim to use two that are the same size, or perhaps to give speech the larger font. As it is, with spoken words looking smaller than the rest of the text, it seems a little backwards.

    You didn't stick to one basic size for stanzas, nor did you maintain a consistent framework for your rhyming, which can be good or bad depending. Not sticking to 4 line stanzas throughout allowed you to do more with the language, split things up for better flow and style, which is good. The inconsistent rhyming is alright, but it makes the stanzas where you use a basic ABAB pattern seem relatively wooden and out of place. Also, your rhyming didn't hew to very strict strong rhymes of the traditional sense, using soft/weak rhymes where necessary and just saying fuck the rhymes otherwise. Again, could be good or bad, but I think it mostly worked out for you here because none of them stuck out to me as a bad or ill-fitting rhyme.

    I'd suggest you try to use some of the more subtle poetic tricks to add the flow of your work: rhymes inside one line rather than just at the end of two separate lines ("her face, her endless grace" as one line vs. face and grace at the end of two different lines), alliteration, assonance, consonance, so on. You could also try for more metaphor and descriptive language; the part where you described The Woman was quite heavy in the vivid imagery, so it was disappointing to see very little of that later on. Consistency was kind of problematic in another way, too. In some stanzas you have very long lines amidst short ones, and vice versa; I'm speaking of syllabic length here, not visual. Having such jarring differences can make the reader recognize things seeming off, thus screwing with your flow, so try to keep instances of vastly different line lengths for moments where you want to jar the reader. And one last thing: some of your lines were kind of odd and ill-fitting, making me pause and wonder wtf you were doing. "Fortunately, he remembered his socks," comes to mind. It just doesn't fit, seems goofy and out of place, like you couldn't think of anything else to go there and keep the rhyme intact. There's not a lot you can do to avoid these sorts of lines other than reading your work aloud and trying to spot things that seem out of place, but it's all rather subjective so that's obviously a problem.

    Overall I'd give it 8/10. I liked it, which is not at all usual for me and poetry.


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  5. #15
    Non Sibi Sed Patriae The Australian's Avatar
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    Pulled into war to serve a vision;
    That's supposed to last a thousand years.
    Part of a machine;
    Unstoppable, as merciless as tidal waves.



  6. #16
    Magnificent Bastard Jorick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Hellis View Post
    You know what, this could be fun.

    First off, cool concept. I've always been interested in things where names have great power. Names as the whole of your identity, and then being stripped away, seems fun.

    For the writing, it's kind of bad. You use a lot of sentence fragments and very short sentences in quick succession, which makes your writing very choppy rather than flowing smooth as it should. There are also some spelling errors, and some phrasing that's kind of broken. You shouldn't start so many sentences with 'and,' most of those should be replaced with another word to start the sentence or shouldn't be sentences by themselves, should be attached to the preceding sentence by a comma. I recall you saying something about English not being your first language, so having issues with the written form (which is probably more difficult than speaking the language) is understandable. You're doing better than a lot of native speakers, so consider that a success.

    To try to fix the problems, I have two suggestions. First, try reading your writing out loud, try to keep it to a natural speaking rhythm rather than pausing wherever you have a period. I know elsewhere periods are called 'full stops,' and that's what they represent. Periods should go where you make a full pause in speech, not everywhere. If you make a short pause it should be a comma, if there is no pause when you say it out loud then there probably shouldn't be any punctuation at all. Another way to look at it is that commas separate different but very closely related parts of a thought, periods separate different thoughts. This might be slightly confusing if you don't think of things in the same was as me, so feel free to disregard that and stick to the analogy between pauses in speech and punctuation.

    My second suggestion would be to use a spellchecker program, preferably one that detects sentence fragments and improper phrasing and such rather than one that only looks for misspelled works. If you can acquire a copy of Microsoft Word, their spellchecker system works pretty well for that. I don't know of any others that do that because that's the only one I've ever had need of, but I'm sure some exist, probably even some free ones on the internet. Using such a program could fix all your problems, really. It's not that you're bad at the language, your ideas are clear enough and I can tell what you're saying, it's just some mechanical problems that need some work.

    Overall I'd give it a 5/10 because of the reasons stated above. Probably could go easily up to a 7/10 if you run it through a properly equipped spellchecker. I think I'm going to stop using a 10 point rating system though, because trying to decide what number to give people takes up almost as much time as writing the review.


    Did you know we have a Writer of the Month contest? Come join it.
    The WOTM #26 Theme Choice thread is up and voting is open through May 20th.


  7. #17
    Mrow ^.^ WereCat's Avatar
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    Jorick please help me by reading and possibly editing my assignment.

    Pretty please.




  8. #18
    Most Refined Douchebag Kill Bones's Avatar
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    I don't have anything I've written on hand, but critique my writing in the latest rpgfa that I totally gave up on because real world obligations


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  9. #19

  10. #20
    Magnificent Bastard Jorick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by WereCat View Post
    Jorick please help me by reading and possibly editing my assignment.

    Pretty please.
    Do I look like a fucking editor? D:<

    Reading can be done though.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kill Bones View Post
    I don't have anything I've written on hand, but critique my writing in the latest rpgfa that I totally gave up on because real world obligations
    You bastard. I'll get around to it in due time.


    Did you know we have a Writer of the Month contest? Come join it.
    The WOTM #26 Theme Choice thread is up and voting is open through May 20th.


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