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 Review #4600501 |
 | Dark matter is ordinary light.  [E] Photons are all around us and almost totally invisible  |
| (4.0)  Welcome to WdC from the "Newbie Welcome Wagon" KISMET. noun. Destiny; Fate. Good morning, A Cassandra. , and I hope it finds you well. I review a lot, most commonly fictional short stories. I usually click on those filters before I even look for a subject to review, but today I didn't, and look what I found! In the immortal words of Jim Bishop, "A good writer is not per se, a good book critic any more than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender," but bear with me; I'm going to take a shot anyway (see what I did there?)  .For the record, my real name is Jack Tyler, and I am a retired mystery, steampunk, and horror writer who tries to review in a wide variety of genres. While I have a few books in print, I am neither a famous author nor a renowned critic. I'm just a guy with an opinion that I'm here to share, and if you disagree with anything I say here, remember that the only opinion that matters is yours. As I said, I'm no authority, but hopefully my comments will give you some ideas to take your writing in directions you hadn't previously considered. Another bit of background: While hardly professionally trained, I love astronomy and when trolling YouTube never miss a video about the latest theories and discoveries, so when I saw this, I knew I had to pay a little visit. I use a fiction template that hasn't much to do with a scientific paper, but I'll modify it, and I think it will be all right. Let me just drop a warning here, and we'll get started. THIRD-PARTY READERS TAKE NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD PRESENTATION: This aspect deals with the first impression your story makes when a reader clicks on the title. Call it the cosmetics. I'll be looking at abstract items from text density to scene dividers in an effort to ferret out any unfortunate habits that might cause a reader to move on without actually reading anything; before you can dazzle him with your show, you have to get him into the tent!  There are three issues I want to address here, so a bullet format should work pretty well. First is your paragraphing; there isn't any, and that causes issues for the reader who has spent his or her whole life reading paragraphed works. I prefer them indented, which you achieve on WdC by placing {indent} at the beginning of each paragraph. Sounds tedious, but there is a shortcut box at the top of the creation page that places one wherever you click on it. The other method, widely accepted on WdC, is to simply double-space at the beginning of each new paragraph. This review includes both methods, so you can judge for yourself which is more effective, but it definitely needs one or the other. Second, there appear to be a couple of spelling issues in the text. Those are always unfortunate, and tend to break a reader's immersion, but in a scientific text, I as a layman can't be sure whether you made a mistake, or I'm reading some unfamiliar scientific term for the first time. An example of that is this line: hanks to relativistic effects Check. My internal spell checker parses that as "Thanks to..." but am I right, or am I missing something profound? Also, this could benefit from a period after "effects." A more obvious error pops up in Where an assumption is sheared... This should of course be "shared," and it should be noted that because "sheared" is a word, spell checker isn't going to help you a bit with that. The Mark I Eyeball is the only gatekeeper for many of these spellings, and the wise author applies it liberally. Finally, there is the matter of font. You have used the default font that WdC provides on the creation page. I am told it is Arial; I only half-jokingly call it Times New Eyestrain, as I often have to stack two pairs of reading glasses to make it hold still. None of that is helped by the lack of paragraphs, but I haven't deducted from your rating for using what's provided. Rather, I'm offering a suggestion to make this more reader-friendly: Place the command {size:3.5} at the beginning of your text; you'll be surprised at the difference it makes. There are many ways to tweak your text. This review, for example, is in 3.5 Verdana with 1.4 line-spacing, all things you'll learn to do as you get more comfortable here.STORY: But those are things that can be fixed with a few mouse clicks. Now we come to the heart of the issue. Whether you're writing fact or fiction, prose or poetry, the "holy grail" that you're striving for is immersion. This is really the basic element, isn't it? If you can't tell an engaging story or make your point in coherent manner, it doesn't matter what else you can do, because nobody's going to read it anyway. I always try to explain aspects from characters to grammar, but I don't know how to teach someone to have an imagination, and scientific leaps certainly begin in the imagination. Let's examine the individual parts of the whole and see what works to make it successful. You espouse a premise that, if you hadn't said it was over a decade old, I would have thought originated with you. You make a compelling argument for a theory that is off the main stream, which, if my reading is any indication, is how ideas grow through assumptions into facts. Science, after all, used to believe that Earth, specifically Athens, was the center of the universe. Will dark matter photons become mainstream? Likely neither of us will live to see it if it does, but you make a well-reasoned case in an easy to read format without resorting to huge and intimidating formulas and concepts. Whatever else this may be, it is good writing, and we're on a writing site here, not an astronomer's forum. I can only say, great job!SUMMARY: I generally go on about characters, settings, and so on, things that have no place in a scientific document, so I'm going to wrap it here. I think I've made my points as clearly as you've made yours, and I hope you find them useful. Here's hoping the writing aspect of your craft supports your endeavors to the fullest, and that you have a great time on WdC!** Image ID #2234711 Unavailable ** As a member with some experience here, allow me to offer you some links you may find helpful. First and foremost has to be
Second is
The third place I'm going to recommend is, of course, my blog,
Finally, I don't operate a group, but I'm a member of a good one, and I recommend a visit soon.
Looking forward to seeing you around the site!  Jack "Blimprider" Tyler My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 03/03/2021 @ 6:30pm EST