Hello SFTTarget,

I found your personal essay link on the "Please Review" page. I had no idea I'd end up reading such a brave, deeply personal story. Thank you for sharing it.

I wish there wasn't such senseless violence and I wish all parents were kind and loving to their children. I'm sorry you suffered so.

The end of your essay was strong and made me glad for you to be empowered and, it sounds like, freed from some of the chains of your childhood. Well done!

In the spirit of helpfulness, I do have some suggestions for improving the technical parts of the essay. The message itself is already perfect. These are meant to be constructive criticisms but of course, just take what serves you and ignore what doesn't.

1) It is my understanding that the periods in these two sentences should be inside the quotation marks. Right now they look like this: "Do it for Me". My father would tell me "if you let someone beat you up and you don't fight back, then I will spank you at home". I'm recommending that you edit them to look like this: "Do it for Me." My father would tell me "if you let someone beat you up and you don't fight back, then I will spank you at home."

2) I recommend that you go back through the essay and double check the spacing. For example, in these two sentences there are either extra spaces, missing spaces or both: "It wasn't enough,nothing I did to try and make friends was ever enough. and "I fought, clawed,kicked and stomped." ... in the first sentence there needs to be a space after the comma and before "nothing." In the second sentence there is an extra space after the comma and before "clawed" and a missing space after the comma and before "kicked" ... so if you made these changes the two sentences would now look like this: "It wasn't enough, nothing I did to try and make friends was ever enough." and "I fought,clawed, kicked and stomped."

3) In this sentence there are several ways you could improve it. I think the easiest would be to just delete the word "that" and it would be clearer. The other thing would be to change "since" to "because" because since implies time (since I was born) and because implies causality (because I was young) and I think you are indicating causality here. So the sentence currently looks like this: "No hitting in the face" that was the special rule for me since I had been shot in the eye with the arrow." and with my suggestion would simply change to this: "No hitting in the face" was the special rule for me because I had been shot in the eye with the arrow." And.... being really nit picky now... instead of "the arrow" I'd make it "an arrow" because we don't know the specific arrow you're talking about and I don't remember it being mentioned earlier in the story.

But the arrow in the eye...that would be another story, yes? I'm sorry that happened to you. I can't imagine how painful that must be. I hope you have managed to keep your eyesight intact.

Thank you for sharing your story!

May love, joy and peace be yours in abundance!
PWheeler

*** WDC Angel Army Review ***
** Image ID #1940845 Unavailable **


My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .