Hi Frances R ! Welcome to WDC! I'm here to read and review your item, "The Ball" that I found from clicking on the Random Review button! I hope you are enjoying the WDC 18th Anniversary activities!

Interesting story! You really hooked me right away with the mysterious paper bag. I wanted to keep reading to see what was inside. Very well done there. I also liked your style of story-telling. You made me care about Marty early in the story, which is so important. You also do a good job of giving enough detail so I can visualize the scene, but giving me enough to wonder about as well.

Overall, your grammar and punctuation are fairly good. There were a couple places where your quotation marks were separated with a space from the speech, and several places where you're missing commas, but I wasn't able to copy them all here. Instead, what I would recommend is re-reading your story aloud and whenever you pause naturally when reading, think about whether a comma is needed there. I noticed a few typos as well, which I have pasted below. Your words are in red and my suggestions come after:

sitting on a bench,just watching the people pass by add space after comma

Instead, she looked at me me with a sad look on her face. extra "me"

still warm to the touch,which was odd space after the comma

What are you doing in there? I asked stupidly. Add end quotation marks after question mark

happens everyday, right? every day should be two words

hangnail,but then she started chewing space after comma

I went and got me another beer Perhaps: got myself another beer

My hand flew up to the spot she had hit and a surprised look was in my eyes. Perhaps: ...spot she had hit with a surprised look in my eyes.

per Raul’s instructions, You will go into the ball lowercase y

With the formatting of your piece, I would suggest a few things: First, add spaces between paragraphs with a line, or indent new paragraphs with the {indent} code. Formatting from Word processors gets lost when you copy and paste into WDC, unfortunately. Also, each time someone speaks, their words should be in a new paragraph. You do this for some parts of the story, but not all, so make sure to go back and check that. Finally, it might make your piece easier to read if you increase the size using the {size:4} code. Here's some more information on how to use the WDC coding system called "Writing ML" WritingML Help

I was left with a few questions about your piece. You say, "but all I had was beer" but this is contradicted because he made himself a stiff drink earlier. Also, when the girlfriend got mad at him, he said they were "off again" but he had already told the reader at the beginning of the story that they were off again already? And speaking of the girlfriend, why did she get mad? That wasn't very well explained.

Finally, I think you could improve your chances of getting more reviews by doing a few things. First, add a few more genres to your piece. Right now, you have it listed as "Comedy," but I'm not sure that fits your story. It feels like more of a Thriller/Suspense, or Dark, or Fantasy, or Mystery piece, but you should look through the whole list of genres when editing your piece to pick the three that fit best. This helps people find your piece when searching the site for a specific genre. On that same note, you currently have the intro rated "non-E" which isn't true. All the words in your Title and Description are rated E, so you could change that. This will also help more people find and review your piece because non-E rated intros do not show up in the site wide search function.

Thank you for sharing your writing! And again, welcome to WDC! I hope you make good writing relationships here! Let me know if I can ever help you with anything.

Take care,
-Emily

You responded to this review 09/03/2018 @ 3:19pm EDT

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