(August 2015)

Title: Inanimate Mannequins not Quite the Same as Life-Size Beings

Author: -alisa

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (1)/5

This is a really long title with awkward phrasing and incorrect capitalization. It can get confusing sometimes, but here’s a site that can help you out fairly quickly when it comes to capitalizing your titles. Your title should actually read: Inanimate Mannequins Not Quite the Same as Life-Size Beings.

I can see how the title relates to your story because of the scene in which Taemin wears the clothes that Jinri had imagined for him, but I’m definitely sure that you could have come up with something better.

Description/Foreword: (2)/10
Aesthetically speaking, I’m immediately turned off by your story due to the differences in font size within your description/foreword. Your actual description is the most important part of your introduction, but I have to squint in order to read what it actually says. It’s odd that your story’s stats (i.e., your title, pairing name, rating, word count, etc.) is the largest thing on this page when it’s the most extraneous information on the page.

I don’t believe that your description fares well content-wise either. I didn’t find it interesting and thought that it was odd that you said “those rhyme for a reason” at the very end of the description. Upon initially reading it, I had assumed that said reason would be explained within the plot of the story itself. That didn’t seem to be the case. At the same time, the description seems to claim that Jinri and Taemin “fall in love,” but after reading the story, I can say with confidence that the taelli relationship by the end of this story had yet to truly reach that point. There was nothing about your description that really pulled me in to want to keep on reading.

Plot: (9)/30

It’s difficult to really score you on your plot because despite roughly 5k of words, there isn’t really much that goes on within your story—to me it felt like extended fluff. A lot of the elements of your plot didn’t contribute anything to the storyline itself and seemed to be there just for the sake of being there. The most evident examples of this are the f(x) girls, I’m sad to say, since they only served the roles of background characters. (The tangent about Himchan was also highly irrelevant.) Having characters serve cameos can be okay sometimes, but in this case, it felt like there was an intention for them to have defined personalities, making them fit somewhere between a cameo and a stock. The issue in the case of your story is that your main characters, Jinri and Taemin, already come off as quite flat, so throwing the other f(x) members in there seemed to take away from the time you could have used to develop Jinri and Taemin’s characters further.

There wasn’t anything particularly original that I saw within the plot since it seems to be a pretty generic story about two students from different schools who meet and—against their initial intentions—develop an interest in one another. I felt that the flow of your story was a bit slow, but as aforementioned, this story reminded me of an extended fluff and such stories are typically set at a slower pace.

I found it odd that Taemin refers to himself as a “dancing Greek god” when he’s giving Jinri his number because that’s also what she had called him in her head and the odds of him thinking of the same obscure title are very slim. I was also confused by the fact that you state that Taemin’s text to Jinri ends in a semicolon when you show the readers a copy of the text and there’s no semicolon present. Consistency can go a long way.

Characterization: (5)/20

Most of what I had to say in this section I said in the plot section, so I won’t repeat myself here. Your characters didn’t achieve much development and the only characters that had personalities were Jinri and Taemin—even then, said personalities weren’t very developed. Taemin was the typical cocky, flirty stranger, and Jinri herself didn’t seem to possess any specific personality traits which is a pretty big red flag since this story was told in third-person limited.

At one point you described a girl as having a “tenor tone,” which isn’t the typical description of the female voice. In choir, women are usually split between alto, mezzo-soprano, and soprano, while men are usually split between baritone and tenor. There are some exceptions to this, but do be careful.

Grammar: (7)/15

The biggest issues in terms of your grammar were your punctuation, word choice, and tenses. There were times during which you used too many commas and other times when you were missing them and your capitalization was inconsistent. You also had a couple of convention errors right off the bat; numbers should always be written out instead of just putting in their digits, i.e., “ten” instead of “10”.

Your tense mistakes were littered heavily throughout the story, but I’ll only list one example here.

“But she guessed Jongin isn’t as bad as Lee Taemin.”

You’re using both the past and the present tense in this sentence and so it reads weirdly. Here’s a possible correction:

“But she figures that Jongin isn’t as bad as Lee Taemin.”

Some of your issues in regards to word choice simply had to do with using one word and meaning another (“unto” should have been “onto” and “heart warming” should be “heartwarming”), but there were moments when I couldn’t even understand what you were trying to say due to poor word choice.

“Everything that Soojung said has almost hurt in all the right places.”

Not only is there a huge tense issue in this sentence as well, but it’s difficult for me to decode the meaning behind the sentence and I shouldn’t have to struggle for that as a reader.

Writing Style: (2)/15

I firmly believe that it’s difficult to have a unique writing style of your own unless you properly understand the rules of grammar, so don’t feel too disappointed with the low score you received in this section. Your syntax comes off as highly repetitive and you have a tendency to start a lot of your sentences with “but” even though you shouldn’t start sentences with conjunctions unless you’re doing something rhetorically significant within the text. The diction of your story felt forced and unnatural at points, and this carried over into the dialogue of the characters themselves as they usually said things that I can’t imagine real people to actually say. A good way to fix this is to say their dialogue out loud to get a feel for whether or not it feels natural to you.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5

I didn’t develop any attachment to the characters or the storyline so it was difficult for me to really enjoy this.

Total Score: 27/100

Reviewer’s Comments: I would recommend that you work on your grammar and your characterization as you continue to write in the future. With practice, I’m sure that you’ll improve in  no time!