Hello, Misterfur , and good morning.

First, I want to welcome you to Writing.Com. From your portfolio I learned that you joined yesterday and that this is the first piece you posted. I hope that you learn much from the good people on this site, and, most of all, I hope you have fun.

Your piece today was a confusing read to me that suffered from errors of basic grammar, so I rated this piece with two stars. I feel that this can be a nice little story if we get to work fixing some of these issues. Here are my personal rating and review policies for your reference: "Bobbi's Rating and/or Reviewing Policy" . If you have any questions at all regarding your rate and review, please feel free to email me.


The typos and grammar issues I caught were as follows:

There are too many individual grammar issues to correct on here, but I will touch on a few common issues I noticed throughout the piece and highlight them. I will also extend an offer to do a full line edit via email. If you'd like that, please send me an email and let me know.

The first thing I will suggest is more white space on your item to make it easier to read. Huge word blocks are difficult on the eyes when reading from a computer screen, so I recommend either a full double space on the whole document or placing a space in between each paragraph. I usually do the space between paragraphs on my own work.

I noticed at first you had issues with correct dialogue structure. You were using a semicolon to separate dialogue tags instead of using quotation marks to encase the dialogue. You started to correct yourself a little way into the piece, but you can go back and edit your work to utilize the correct dialogue format for all of your speakers. The correct dialogue format looks like this:

"Dialogue and more dialogue," Speakerperson said.

Talkperson said,"Dialogue and dialogue."

It might be hard to see, but I colored the commas red because comma placement in dialogue is non-existent in your piece. When the dialogue is before the person speaking, the comma goes after the speech inside the quotation marks. When the person speaking is before the dialogue, the comma is after the "said" and before the quotation marks. The period is also always at the end of the sentence no matter whether the speaker is first or the dialogue (I colored the periods green, which may, again, be hard to see). Does that make sense?

Probably the grammar issue that made it the most difficult to understand your story was the run-on sentences. Simply breaking up some of your longer sentences into shorter ones can go a long way toward helping the reader understand your story.

There's a course at the New Horizons Academy here at Writing.Com that deals with grammar and usage, and I highly recommend it. Here's the course catalogue for the other options at New Horizons: "Invalid Item" . Their spring courses have already begun, but the summer courses begin in June, I believe.


A few things I noticed as a reader:

From what I understood, this story involves a cat couple. One day, the husband cat brings home a baby duck that he intended to be cooked for dinner, but the wife cat fell in love with its cuteness and talked her husband into keeping it. After a time, the cats go out for a nice dinner and try the special of the night: duck with orange sauce. Realizing how delicious duck can be presented a conflict for the cats.

This is an interesting conflict of compassion versus animal instinct (and duck deliciousness). The ending felt a little rushed to me, but I also understand that these are cats and not people, and they run a little differently than us. I respect that. The most prominent issues for me was the grammar issues that made it difficult to read the story. It took a couple of reads to get the whole story in. I think this story will read so much better when you straighten these out, though.

Thank you for allowing me to review your piece. I'm just another reader and writer so use or discard any of my suggestions at your personal discretion. If you make changes and would like me to reassess your piece for a higher rating, feel free to e-mail me.

Keep writing and keep improving!

—Brandi