Sunni's Review &Edit - closed

 (This message was edited by sunnygal136 on 04-27-03 @ 10:27 pm EDT)

Okay, maybe I am crazy, but I thought the three ideas linked together. This piece has an interesting feel to it and it makes me want to read more - to find out what caused this character's suffering, what the prophetic experience was, and who or what is doing the pursuing.

The only problems I could find were the excessive use of semi-colons, a sentence that seemed overdone and out of place, and a few confusing sentences.

1) Semi-colons everywhere! Please note, this is coming from someone who probably under uses this punctuation.
Examples where you could leave them out:
You write: Death is something you can avoid; or should I say escape? These are not really two independent clauses. You could use a comma instead.
You write: Of course, my exterior disposition is constantly relaxed; cool and collected, some would say. Using a colon here would be more correct I think. (the sentence could end after "relaxed" but you go on with an explanation of sorts.)

2)You write: Using a pen I had cunningly usurped from the janitor of the Liverpool Hospital Trauma Ward, ... For some reason this sentence jumps out at me as being out of place with the style of the speaker so far in the story. As I reread the story it seems to fit better, but I thought I would bring it to your attention anyway.

3) You write: , but – if anything – they only subdued the presence of Mother Nature around me; as if she could sense the organic creation being poisoned, feel it herself, the way someone inflicted with voodoo pain would. I would change the semicolon to an em-dash (the second part isn't as closely related to the first part of the sentence as it should be for use of semicolon. It need to be set apart with stronger punctuation.) or, even better, make the second part a separate sentence. It was as if she could sense the organic creation being poisoned, feel it herself, the way someone inflicted with voodoo pain would.

You write: For seven hundred and thirty days I have been too scared to sleep with my eyes closed, yet too scared to let the subsequent tears build up in my eyes. This sentence just doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying ultimately that you are afraid to sleep with your eyes open? Could you just stick with saying that you are too scared to sleep but don't really have an alternative?

Well, that is about it. In general I liked the writing. Thanks for submitting to "Sunni's Review &Edit - closed" 


Writing is an Expression of the Mind and Soul---Sunni17