Talk:To Ascend

LoganWoerner Story Review: To Ascend
This is my official review for Rando07's entry into the Spring Writing Contest 2014, To Ascend.

This is a very simple plot, but it's still a plot. I view a plot like this: near the beginning of the story, the protagonist has a goal, and near the end of the story, we find out whether or not the protagonist meets said goal. The goal of this story's protagonist&mdash;Rando&mdash;is to climb a tree. I'll let the reader find out if he completes this goal or not. Even though the plot is extremely simple, it nicely contrasts the beautiful description used in this story, particularly near the beginning, before he starts to climb the tree, which describes the action of the story&mdash;climbing the tree.

There are only one or two mistakes made, and I think they are more typos than a lack of understanding, so I'll just paste the offending sentence here:

Rando’s armour almost mirrored the shade of green around him, the faint and youthful glow of his sauntering green eyes were the only parts of him that were not concealed by the forest.

It's a great sentence, to be clear, but the comma used here should be replaced with a semicolon. I think you know how grammar works, so I won't linger on this for too long.

I also really love the ending of the story, where it depicts Rando at the top of the tree, looking out into the horizon as the sun sets. I don't want to spoil the beautiful passages written in the story, so I'm not going to paste one here.

I'm sorry that I'm left speechless; I'm better at pointing out problems than I am at describing good writing. I have nothing else to say, so I'll go on to the final verdict.

Final Verdict: The extremely simple plot works well for this story, mostly because of the skillful placement of words and the use of picturesque description. There is one instance where there is a run-on sentence near the beginning of the story, but Rando just needs to change one punctuation mark, so it's no big deal. Where other stories using simple plots fail, To Ascend only succeeds. I'm looking forward to more from Rando.

Score: B

&mdash; Logan Woerner   (Blog) 15:45, March 7, 2014 (UTC)