TITLE: (4/5)

The title definitely gets the point of what the story is about across, however, your choice of using ‘girly’ throws me off. It just isn’t a word that you would typically see in a title, and the use of it is just odd to me.

FOREWORD + DESCRIPTION: (8/10)

Your description tells people what the story will be about. Aside from that, you do entail some of the details of the story, but there’s not much else. You lead people into wondering what will happen, but personally, it seemed sort of plain, as though it were lacking something.

I see it a lot in stories where people have images of the characters in the forewords so the readers know who they’re talking about/what the characters look like, but I sincerely believe that you should leave that to your writing. Let your writing express your characters to your readers. Let your writing paint the picture for you.

GRAMMAR + PUNCTUATION: (10/15)

In your first paragraph, you use ‘no kidding’ twice in very close procession. The first time you use it is fine, however, the second time it seems a bit odd and doesn’t exactly fit. Along with this, try not to use the same words right after each other. You have “he would set it aside and look at the bright side. What bright side? The fact that…” While this does work perfectly fine, you say “bright side” yet again a few words later. If you want to switch it up a bit, consider using “what exactly was the bright side? The fact that he was friends with the legendary Hong Jisoo? Yeah, that’s it. That’s the bright side.”

Also, don’t be afraid to use the formatting (italics, bold) to emphasize words, not just to indicate different thoughts. In some cases, it may come across as unprofessional, but I feel like it adds character to the writing. After all, it’s not like you’re writing for the New York Times, right?

Your transitional sentence between Seokmin’s thoughts and their conversation the night before is very awkward. You want to make things flow together well, and do your best not to start sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’, since it often makes transitions very difficult. It also makes starting new sentences seem choppy and messy.

In this section as well, you suddenly switch from past tense to present tense. There’s lots of switching back and forth that I can’t exactly pinpoint any exact example, but try to choose one tense and stick to it.

When you wrote “Seokmin asked in the perfect mixture of confusion, calm and stable voice,” this sentence doesn’t grammatically make sense. Confusion is a noun whereas calm and stable are both adjectives. If you are trying to describe the ‘perfect mixture’ of emotions, stick to the nouns. ‘Seokmin asked in the perfect mixture of confusion, calmness and stability.’ If you are trying to describe his voice, stick with the adjectives. ‘Seokmin asked, his voice confused, calm and stable.’

When Jisoo says “Let’s go to an adventure”, you’re using the wrong proposition here. Instead of ‘to’, you should be using ‘on’. You have a few more mistakes with your propositions throughout the story as well.

At one point, you used the wrong ‘there’. “The two got out of the car and Seokmin realized that their at the school.” The ‘their’ should be replaced with ‘they’re’.

You also use ‘ought’ every time you’re supposed to use ‘thought’. Please double check your writing and look up things that you aren’t too sure of.

“He was confuse. Very confuse” doesn’t make sense. Confuse is a verb. The word you are looking for is confused, which is an adjective.

You use your commas very well. There weren’t really any issues that I could see. You used them before the correct conjunctions and placed them after prepositional phrases. Good job with that, commas are really difficult to understand! One thing I have to say, though, is that you tend to word your phrases very oddly as if to purposely include commas into them. There are a LOT of commas in your writing. Consider rewording to remove some of them. It’s not fun having to mentally stop when you’re reading because of so many commasㅠ~ㅠFor example, you have “Jisoo chuckled, his chuckles were deep, he looked at Seokmin before saying,” this isn’t exactly correct, and though it is short, it seems like a run-on sentence since these commas aren’t necessary. “Jisoo chuckled. His chuckles were deep and he looked at Seokmin before saying” is much more correct and flows better.

Don’t forget that each separate quotation garners its own new paragraph. Never continue a different quotation in the same paragraph. You’ve done a pretty good job of that, there’s just a few areas you’ve missed.

CHARACTERIZATION: (18/20)

When Seokmin is around Jisoo, he doesn’t act like how you made him out to be in the beginning. In the beginning, you said that he felt like Jisoo was perfect and he was nothing, but whenever he’s with Jisoo, he acts fine. He acts like they’re on the same level.

Also, Jisoo did a complete 180. I know that was sort of the point, that people see him as this great being when in reality, all he wanted was to be a normal person, but that personality change was wild.

PLOT: (16/20)

Your plot was fairly interesting. There was a clear beginning, the direction it was going to go, and a clear ending. If I had to pick on something, I thought there would be an element of magic in the story, or that the locket would have more ethereal significance in the story. The way you described the locket throughout the story made it seem as though it were some kind of foreign object, when in reality, it was just a locket.

FLOW + WRITING STYLE: (7/10)

Your story jumps a bit from time to time and it does make sense, but it just doesn’t flow as I would like it to. There is definitely room for improvement, but you’ve already done an amazing job. I understand your want for a format and to make your story look nice, but a lot of the time, a format isn’t needed. The default layout of AFF is pretty nice for reading (in my opinion) and it doesn’t mess with the spacing of your lines. I personally hate reading stories that have no spaces between paragraphs, and with your story, the only spaces between paragraphs that I can see are when we jump to a new scene.

ENDING: (8/10)

You wrapped up all your loose ends in the last few paragraphs. You successfully cleared up any questions that I may have had, and gave a little insight into their lives now. I felt like it was slightly rushed, as though you had to get every detail of Jisoo’s life out there as soon as you could. Other than that, it was a well-paced ending with good descriptions.

ENJOYMENT: (4/10)

I’m afraid that it wasn’t one of my favourite stories. Aside from the fact that I don’t know anything about Seventeen or Pledis, the whole ‘focusing on a girly locket’ aspect isn’t exactly something I like. Symbolism can be done really well, and you introduced the locket halfway through, even though it should be one of the most important things in the entire story. As said before, I sincerely do not like the use of the word ‘girly’ to describe anything. It may appear as a harmless word, but it can hold a lot of ugly connotations.

TOTAL: (75/100)

I’m not a fan of Seventeen nor am I a fan of symbolism, but you’ve done a great job with both! There are definitely areas where you can improve, but you’ve done very well with what you have. The idea personally seemed a bit far off for me, and you didn’t take the story in the direction I expected, so I was mildly confused throughout the story. After understanding the story, though, I thought it was splendid! Good job ^^