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Legends of Atara Nui: Review Topic


Geardirector

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The review topic for my epic, The Legends of Atara Nui

 

I suppose this is as good a place as any to explain this, so here goes:

 

The general premise of this epic is essentially set on a heavily altered Mata Nui, with different Matoran elements, principles, environments and characters.

 

Please, do tell me what you think.

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Akiri Nuparu Posts:

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The first thing that caught my eye when reading this was how similar your writing style is to mine, especially the long sentences with appositives, participle phrases, and absolute statements. Of course it also has the potential of having the same weaknesses, namely purple prose and being overly detailed, which is something to watch out for. We get some vivid descriptions right off the bat, and the suspense certainly kept my attention for most of the scene, although dragged on a bit too long. At first I thought the prologue was fairly unoriginal, but now I see that the similarity to Mata Nui was intentional. I imagine as the story progresses that the differences between Atara Nui and Mata Nui will ultimately more interesting than their similarities.

 

Now for grammar. I spotted too many minor mistakes / modifications I would make to mention here, so I want to point out the most important ones. The only consistent error I found was a lack of commas introducing and completing quotations. If the sentence continues after a quotation, there needs to be a comma before the closing quotation marks.

“Alright, girls,” Virna called to her gathered crew, “there’s been a change of plans.

 

Also, in direct address, characters' names should be set off from the rest of the sentence with commas, not a semicolon.

“Rilvi, throw the fish overboard”

 

Another more subtle error you should try to avoid is the dangling modifier, such as in this sentence:

Her gaze flicked across the crew, noting their confused faces and worried gazes at the distant stormclouds.

 

The problem here is that the phrase "noting their confused faces and worried gazes at the distant stormclouds" modifies Virna, but the subject of the sentence is "gaze." To make it clear that the gaze is not doing the noting, the sentence should be rewritten along the lines of "Virna gazed at the crew, noting..." or "As her gazed flicked across the crew, Virna noted..."

 

Other than that, some general suggestions would be to avoid the passive voice and contractions outside of dialogue if possible, remember periods at the ends of sentences, and be careful of comma splices. There were a few other parts that were not technically mistakes but were stylistically awkward, such as the comment about irony, which didn't really add anything. Overall, I found this to be a decent piece of writing, and I think you have a promising premise. I look forward to seeing how you develop it as the story progresses.

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Other than that, some general suggestions would be to avoid the passive voice and contractions outside of dialogue if possible.

Could you clarify what exactly you mean by this?

 

Sure, the passive voice is when the subject of the sentence is the noun that is receiving the action of the verb. In the active voice (which is usually preferred), the agent (the noun doing the action) is the subject. So the sentence "The dog bit the man" is in the active voice and "The man was bitten by the dog" is in the passive voice. Here's an example from your epic:

 

Soon, the sound of complaints competing with haphazard grunts of acknowledgement could be heard.

 

You might want to change this to something like "Soon she could hear the sound of complaints competing with the haphazard grunts of acknowledgement." The passive voice can be used if you want to emphasize the noun receiving the action (or demphasize the agent), but you should generally use the active voice unless you have a good reason not to do so.

 

Contractions are words like "can't," "don't," he's," and so forth that have apostrophes ('). Generally you want to avoid using them in formal writing, but in dialogue when the characters are speaking to each other, it usually sounds more natural.

 

These aren't strict rules, just advice to make your writing sound better. Hope this clears things up.

Edited by Exitium

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  • 2 months later...

Yeah, bi-weekly releases obviously didn't happen, but I'm not giving up in this story just yet. I do want to finish it, but it's basically being written cold.

 

All I can say is sorry for the long delay and I hope to have something more in the near future.

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Akiri Nuparu Posts:

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