Soarer's adventure trough Unova

claiming! (= expect a grade sometime today!

 

Story

WOO we've got a first story here! We have the typical opening of a trainer receiving his first Pokemon and then taking on a gym, which is a good starting point. For future stories, we certainly want to vary up the adventure from the norm. The norm is a story where a trainer ventures into the Woods to find a Pokemon or receives his first mon. We want to branch out as much as we can from this and get creative! It's also helpful to keep in mind that your story doesn't have to follow the Pokemon games' plot. I like that Soarer decides that he doesn't want to go on the gym path and instead just wants to have fun with his Pokemon. From this, I know you can craft some really exciting and unconventional adventures! Think outside of the box, and have fun writing!

Description

Good job describing Biance! Now what about our main character or his Snivy or Magikarp? For every character that comes into our story, we want to give them a little bit of description. Anywhere from a few words to a few sentences throughout will do! We especially want a solid description for more important characters. Don't leave us waiting too long - we'd love to see your creations! I loved that "glistening red" was used to describe Magikarp, btw!

Describing moves or the environment is also important. The more we invest in these descriptions, the stronger our story becomes, and the more we immerse our readers in our world. As it currently stands, I didn't know what Aspertia City looked like or what any moves looked like. Spending time describing these things is very helpful! On a similar note, it's also helpful to describe our characters' motivations too. Why exactly does Soarer give up on the gym path, and how do we know this? How does it change him moving forward?

Grammar

We want to make sure we capitalize the names of all proper nouns. A proper noun is an individualistic name for a person, place, or thing, and in the traditional URPG, all Pokemon, moves, and items are also proper nouns. So we would also capitalize Unova Region and all the mon names here, too!

Comma usage and sentence structure are our two major facets to work on for future stories. To simplify things, without super complicated rules, we know that a sentence is a completed thought. It requires a verb and a subject which agree with one another.

The words before the equals signs are not completed thoughts that can stand on their own. "What she didn't realize" could be a completed thought, but the word "what" implies a question that is being asked. "Paralyzing the poor guy" lacks a subject: who is doing the paralyzing? The statements after show how easily we can incorporate these phrases into completed thoughts and sentences.

At the same time, we want to make sure our completed sentences end without adding too much onto them! For now, it's useful to think of a complete sentence as a full thought that stops with the completion of that thought.

There's a little bit too much going on in this sentence. Soarer deciding to fish in Aspertia, fishing in the pond, missing two encounters, and landing a bite are all completed thoughts, so it'd be a good exercise to see how we can break up this sentence fluidly!

To keep things simple about comma usage, we know that we use a comma anytime we pause in speech.

The commas here are unnecessary because we would not pause there in speech. I find that it's helpful to read things out loud as we're writing and see where our voices would naturally pause. ^^

There were a handful of spelling errors and typos, but for a story of this rank that's not quite a problem! As an overall tip to sum up this section: it'd be so helpful to read as many URPG stories as you can! It's difficult to try to iron out all the minuscule conventions of English writing, so reading is such a good way to figure these things out and pick up on them. Overall, I understood your ideas clearly, which is wonderful! Reading more and writing more will help you just refine these ideas and your grammar as you type!

Length

For everything written we do on the URPG, we count characters as "Characters With Spaces". ^^ Your current CC count is characters with no spaces, so with the spaces you actually have 4.7k characters, which is well towards the far end of your CC range! For future stories, note that the MCR is more of a soft guideline than a hard restriction. For a story that's on the tipping point of a pass or fail, length comes more into play then. This story's success was no question, so don't worry! Just something to keep in mind as you keep writing.

On a quick note, you only want one space between each of your paragraphs. You have double the spaces as of right now, so take care to press that enter bar only twice as you finish up a paragraph.

Outcome

Magikarp Captured! Congratulations on your first story! ^^ Keep reading other stories, brainstorming new ideas, and working on improving descriptions! Hope to see you in this section often! Check out the Winter Writing Competition if you'd like! c:

 

If the extra space between paragraphs is a copy/paste thing, I used to have that trouble on PWN all the time. It helps to clear the formatting before pasting it onto the forums or if you can paste without the fancy code editor activated on here. Something between the forum and word doc formats don't mesh.

 

Actually, new forum formatting for here completely threw the "hit enter twice for a new paragraph" out the window, and you only do it once now in MS word/copy-pasting from an external source (ie if you were writing a story double spaced). Still hit enter twice if you're writing in the post maker itself. :x