Hello, nosh16, and good morning.

Welcome to WDC! I found "Invalid Item"  on the Review Request board. You didn't have any special requests for reviewing so I will give you a general critique. The item reads like it is one of your first drafts with excessive typos and grammar issues, which is why I rated it with two and a half stars. Here are my policies for rating and reviewing for your reference: "Bobbi's Rating and/or Reviewing Policy" . If you have any questions regarding your review or rating, please feel free to email me.

The first thing I noticed when I opened your item was that there were huge blocks of text. Reading blocks of text like this is harsh on a computer screen, and there were parts where I had to highlight sentence by sentence to keep my place. Using more white space on the screen and breaking up some of these paragraphs will make reading the piece easier on the eyes and more enjoyable.


The typos and grammar issues I caught were as follows:

I am sitting in my room right now in my mother's house I added a possessive apostrophe.

I guess it's time This 'its' is actually a contraction of 'it is' and not possessive, so it needs to be "it's".

until i I got injured There are a few places in this piece where the 'I' needs to be capitalized.

nobody to these people(,) I guess that's what The comma in the parenthesis is a comma splice. This is what happens when two independent clauses are joined by only a comma, and it is frowned upon. Either a conjunction needs to go after the comma to join the clauses, the comma needs to be replaced by a semicolon, or the clauses need to be separated into two sentences. I also put a apostrophe in "thats" since it's a contraction.

last 2 two years It's the general rule to write out numbers zero through one hundred. Dates are exempt from this, but ages (I'm seventeen years old) are not.

that are on this page(,) maybe you are someone Also a comma splice.

Football, is the greatest sport that ever was, some believe that,. There are a few issues with this sentence, mostly with the comma usage. The commas around "is the greatest sport that ever was" implies that you can take that out and the sentence will still make sense, which isn't true. I'm going to take out all of the commas here and emphasize "some believe that" with an em dash:

Football is the greatest sport that ever was—some believe that.

is it the rush it gives them?, or that satisfaction that they are the best at something?, is the power or status they get from it?, or the felling feeling of winning? It's not proper to make lists peppered with question marks or any other extra punctuation. Since you have clauses followed by phrases, I restructured this part to correct the grammar for the conditions:

Is it the rush it gives them or the satisfaction that they are the best at something? Is it the power or status they get from it or the feeling of winning?

There are many more grammatical issues, so I will offer to do a full line edit via email. Please email me if you are interested.


A few things I noticed as a reader:

The piece is written from the perspective of a high school senior who seemed to have lost everything—his status, his friends, his girlfriend—when he sustained an injury and lost his position on the football team. He said that this was because of his choices, and the first paragraph seemed to set up the story of the choices that lead to this outcome.

From here, the speaker starts to talk about his family history and the strong traditional role that football played in it. He speaks about his father, who was a football star himself, and the selfish decisions he made in his past. All of this gives us background to the main speaker and his point of view, but the piece never comes back around to him, and it appears at this point that the essay wasn't specifically about the high school senior at all.

This is a good start to what can be a solid sports piece and possibly a morality tale about putting people first in your life, but it does need polishing both in grammar and story structure.

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