(September 2015)

Title: Seafoam Green
Author: -heibai

Reviewer: eleutheromaniac

Title: (4)/5

“Seafoam” is probably one of my favorite words right now so I can’t deny that seeing it in your title immediately caught my interest. In fact, I think that I actually really like it when stories are named after obscure colors? So well done, haha. My only concern is that, although the title fits your story, it doesn’t carry much weight.

Description/Foreword: (8)/10

I have to admit that I like the description you gave us in your request form better than the one that you posted on your story due to the sheer simplicity of it. The one that you have up right now is fine as well, but at the same time I feel as though it’s content that you could’ve put into the story itself in order to throw in some actual development.

The description itself has some occasional odd wording—“foggy breath in this warm of a weather”?—as well as some tense issues and minor punctuation errors. Most of this will be discussed later, in the “Grammar” portion of this review, though I would like to point out that the letter after the colon should be lowercase because it starts a dependent clause (more information about that can be found here).

Plot: (4)/30

There isn’t much that happens in your plot save for Zitao feeling kind of hopeless and then dying. The story itself reminded me a lot of The Little Mermaid with the way that Zitao’s life was saved, the way the mermaid sings to him, and his desperation to find her. However, there isn’t much of a twist save for Zitao dying at the end instead of getting with the mermaid. It didn’t feel particularly original and didn’t really excite me either. I also don’t understand why the mermaid even bothered to save him in the first place if she was just going to eat him in the end—that seems like a bit of a plot hole.

Characterization: (1)/20
The only character that we really get to see is Zitao, and even then, he doesn’t have much of a personality. All we get from him is that he is infatuated with a creature that “saved his life” and that he calls it love. This says more about his thought processes than it does his actual personality, though this may have not been the case if his character had some voice.

The mermaid isn’t particularly developed either as I can’t assign her any specific personality traits after reading your story.

Grammar: (9)/15

The biggest mistakes I noticed with your grammar would be the tense issues and the differentiation between singular versus plural words, though I also noted some minor punctuation errors in regards to the placement of your commas.

Although your story is, for the most part, in the past-tense, there are instances when you switch into the present. An example of this can be seen here:

“He told himself that the turquoise froth breaking against the rocky pier was not the color of her eyes, and the whistling wind absolutely does not resemble her voice.”

A corrected version of this should be:

“He told himself that the turquoise froth breaking against the rocky pier was not the color of her eyes_ and that the whistling wind absolutely did not resemble her voice.”

There were other moments when a misunderstanding of the tenses led to strange word choice. An example of that is here:

“Although, things were getting worse lately.”

The sentence structure itself is kind of odd, but using the word “lately” to describe something that’s happened in the past doesn’t make sense as “lately” refers to something that has occurred in the recent present.

Tenses aside, the other prominent grammatical error within the story had to do with singular versus plural words.

“The gentle caress of the sea started to become impatient, as he would only woke up when the morning tide were high enough that he could breathe in the saline water.”

There were multiple grammatical errors within this sentence so I went ahead and underlined them all. The issue of singular versus plural is bolded, however. As “tide” is singular, the following word should be “was” instead of “were”. “Woke” is underlined as it is in the wrong tense (it should be “wake”) and the closing words are underlined just because they make little sense in the context of your imagery. We get that Zitao has been sleepwalking, but you only state that he woke up with “waves lapping against his bare feet,” making me imagine that he had been standing in the water. It’s clear though that you had intended him to have been laying down in the water. Be careful with your descriptions because throughout the text, a lot of them just didn’t seem to add up.

Writing Style: (5)/15

You rely on sentence fragments a lot more than you should. Technically speaking, such fragmentation is considered conventionally incorrect, and the only time conventions should ever be broken is if something rhetorically significant is being done in the text. In the case of this story and its sentence fragments, this isn’t really the case. Sentence fragments appear much too often to add anything special to your syntax and it makes the flow of your text come off as choppy. I also feel as though your syntax (fragments aside) comes off as kind of boring as a lot of your sentences are structured in similar ways. It’s likely that once you develop more of your grammatical knowledge, your writing style will improve on its own.

Personal Enjoyment: (1)/5
A story usually includes some sort of development, and I didn’t really feel like there was much development here at all? There isn’t much of a change other than Zitao going from alive to dead. It feels more like a drabble than a story.

Total Score: 32/100

Reviewer’s Comments: As I mentioned before, this text came off more “drabble-like” to me as it seemed as though the words supposed to be the focus of the story rather than the plot or the characters; this, at least, is the typical case in drabble fics that I’ve read. If you’re looking to enhance your writing style, I would recommend that you first focus on fixing the errors you had in regards to your grammar. Once you develop a thorough understanding of the conventions of the English language, it’s more than likely that your writing style will figure itself out. Just keep practicing and I’m sure that you’ll become a better writer in no time. c: