A Review For Reminiscing Songs| Story by Ambizzbo

Review Written By exoticbabylove

A Chaptered Story

Title

As for the title, I found it having a sense of angst and mourn drifting in those words. I did find the title a little awkwardly-structure. For me, I normally see titles like 'Reminiscing Times' and I have to say that your title sounded weird. However, after getting to know more about the story, I began to appreciate the title that you used. It did have a deep connection to the story.

I have to point out something before we move on to the next criteria, there is a mistake in your poster though. 'Song' should be in plural form like the title. If you could, I would recommend going back to the designer to ask for a edit in the title. After all, it do mean a lot in the appearance of the story. Other than that, I really like the textures and images the designer used in the poster, I have to say that you have a great and picky eye in choosing awesome graphic shops.

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Language

Let's move on to the grammar. I am indeed extremely excited to start reading this fanfic as I am a Cassie. I know I can't be bias when reviewing a requester's works, but I did had that ache and misery that came back to my heart when I found out that it was a DBSK'5 fanfic. I was glad and relieve that someone made a fanfic to reminisce (this is one of the reasons why I love your title, since it was a relevant and useful word in the story) them. I once had a thought that they were forgotten after SHINee and Exo appeared in the music industry.

So, I'm thankful that you created this fic. It was seriously a hard time for me when I heard of the group's disbandment. It was terrible and a pity for 5 such perfect and talented men to disband. Okay, I'm sorry for getting carried away by my personal thoughts, so let's have a look at the description and foreword. I absolutely love the word choices that you chose, those big words blew me away as to how delicate they were and how much reflected to the reality Cassies and DBSK, themselves, are suffering. 

However, when I browse through the description. It was honestly a little poorly-written due to the poor sentence structures. To be honest, I didn't think that your beta reader/editor was doing a good job. This may be harsh but sorry I have to tell you this. Next time, when you find a co-author or a beta reader or an editor, do a thorough check on them. You need a good editor to help in your progress of the stories. Never ask a user that has no stories (be it author or co-authored stories) because we can't know for sure if they are qualified to help you. If that editor has stories or stories that he or she has been editing, have a look at them. If it isn't up to standard, (by meaning this, you will have to look at the sentence structures, grammar usage as well as the punctuation and spelling), ask for help. However, if you don't see any progress after a few weeks, and your sentence structures still looks the same. Find a better one and tell the previous editor that he or she isn't doing a good job on the editing and you need help on that.

So, why do I mean that? Let's have a look at this sentence.

Original: "Songs are the hidden passages to a part of someone's life. A song that means a lot to someone means that the song is familiar to the person. From the songs they like, you can get to know who they are. You don't even need verbal words to communicate. For someone who sings, the meaning is much more deeper. Not only do the singers help other people to express themselves, but it's a way of sending the messages they want to convey. The songs they sang hold precious memories to which only they have the access to."

This is the whole description and I copied them to the review. So, what I have to say is the description was great, words like verbal and convey came out and you were doing great in the vocabulary aspect but it sounded so awkward until I felt so awkward reading it. It was great but the sentence structure was all wrong. Let's have a look at the first sentence in a closer view.

Original Sentence (1): "Songs are the hidden passages to a part of someone's life." 

I found it sounding awkward. In my opinion, the culprit that made the sentence sound awkward was the 'the' but let me structure the sentence a little more.

Edited Sentence (1): "Songs are hidden passages to someone's partial life."

This would be better in my opinion. "To a part of someone's life" sounded weird too so I restructured it.

Original Sentence (2): "A song that means a lot to someone means that the song is familiar to the person. "

I told this to my requesters a lot of times, please do not repeat words in the same sentence, it would cause a sentence structure error which is not what we want. We want the story to have a better flow and this is one of the reasons why I find your story flow abrupt and stiff. So, remember to change your word choice and it is a taboo for me when I use repeated words which isn't too far from each other. The taboo's result is a bad sentence structure. So, let me do some changing for this sentence.

Edited Sentence (2): "A song that means a lot to someone actually shows that the content of it is familiar to him."

So why did I use 'him'? Using 'someone' and 'the person' is making the story stiff, changing it to a 'him' will ease the flow, actually 'him' could used to represent 'him' and 'her', I read that from a book before. Thus, you can do that. However, I didn't like this sentence at all. It irked me a lot when I was trying to transform the sentence. Wasn't this sentence a little straight-forward and obvious? For the song to mean a lot the him, of course the song was familiar to him. You were stating the obvious and it was human nature. So I found the sentence redundant because everyone knows that, so remove it.

Original Sentence (3) & (4): "From the songs they like, you can get to know who they are. You don't even need verbal words to communicate."

The same thing, the problem is the sentence structure. So I am going to do some editing.

Edited Sentence (3) & (4): " We get to know their personality by their song preference instead of verbal words that starts meaningless conversations."

As you can see, I have a 'bad' opinion on conversation starters like hobbies and stuff as they aren't relevant at all, in fact after a long session about  hobbies, we can't even learn about their personalities, characters and what they have been through. I loved this sentence more than the second one, because it did make sense but not many people understand the true meaning of this.

Like what you stated in the comment of your request form, your tenses keep switching. Let's so some editing.

Original: ""The long awaited segment had finally come. Genie Time. It's the segment where Junsu will be granting three wishes from the fans whoattend the concert. Usually for this segment, Junsu always start to get giddy and nervous. Some of the requests his fans made were just..."

Wow, there are underlined words, words that are bold as well as words that are italicized. Serve through those sentences in the foreword or what I would like to call, prologue before I show you my edited version. The words that are underlined are words that are having the wrong tense. The words that are italicized are words that are repeated words(gosh, I hate them) and the words that are in bold are words that are words that makes the sentences sound funny, words that are not suitable in the scenario to be exact.

Like I said, do not repeat words, you repeated 'segment' twice when their distance are near, 'finally come' isn't correct, 'requests his fans made'aren't correct too. Since this is a personal recount or a narrator's point of view, it should be in past tense except for some special circumstances. Junsu is only one person, so it should be in singular form, thus it should be 'starts' instead of 'start'. Please, by the way, finish your sentence.

Let's look at the edited version.

Edited Version: "The long awaited segment, Genie Time, had finally started. This is an activity where Junsu grants three wishes from fans that attended the concert. During the process of it, Junsu always starts to get giddy and nervous. Some of the fan-requests were just absurd."

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