Carnivorous Chair
I have posted this before but did not get a helpful review. I would appreciate a helpful one
thank you
Carnivorous Chair
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» Carnivorous Chair
So… I took a quick look at this, and I'll be honest—it's extremely hard to get through the read because of how many simple errors are present. The overall result is that it makes the draft look sloppy, which makes reviewers less likely to be interested in attempting to help. If the author can't bother to make sure that the basics (like proper spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure) are done correctly, it can feel like a waste of a reviewers' time to slog through something with so many distracting problems.
Here are some immediately noticeable (as in, first 5-second skim) issues for me:
- Special containment procedure: > needs to be capitalized properly, and "Procedures" plural
- a locked room. > overly vague. Technically a broom closet with a lock is a locked room.
- It will be fed > verb tense is kind of inconsistent here
- with small live mammals of the combined weight of 8 kg. > don't need the period after the measurement
- . e.g. cats or wallabies > e.g., (needs comma). Also, why are cats and wallabies specifically mentioned? Surely there are more easy to obtain mammals that would suffice?
- Feeding will occur every 2 days and should be performed by Foundation personnel who have a net worth of over $500,000 USD. > why not just dump the animals into the room via chute?
- Mission Arm Chair > either "Mission Armchair" or "Mission Style Arm Chair"
- manufactured by J. M. Young Circa 1910 > needs a comma
- SCP-0 capable of > missing verb
- and navigation by an unknown method > irrelevant, can be removed
- SCP-0 will explore it's > "It's" means "it is" or "it has", and is not the possessive word.
- and has been known to knock on them with its foot > it has multiple feet, though
- SCP-0 mouth > missing apostophe and s
There are many, many more issues, like unnecessary capitalization. For fixing simple issues, I highly recommend running your draft through a word processing program or writing assistance tool like Grammarly (which is available for free).
Conceptually though, it's weird but not particularly workable. Keep in mind that as the author, you know the entire story, but the Foundation needs to have discovered what it knows about the SCP object through observation and experimentation. You'll need to convince your reader that someone with no prior knowledge whatsoever of the anomaly managed to somehow figure out (not magically know!) all the information you've got in the article. How did the Foundation know that this thing would react differently to people based on their net worth, let alone that was one of the criteria that should be looked at to determine how the thing behaves? Wouldn't the same kind of Foundation staff be in contact with it? Why would it go anywhere near someone with a net worth of $500,000 USD?
Plus there's the already uphill battle of writing another generic monster sort of thing that hurts specific people seemingly for no reason. (I suggest reading over this essay on common SCP pitfalls to get an idea of what elements to avoid putting in an SCP article.) Also, the snarky note at the end from your self-insert character just comes off as goofy and can be taken out entirely.
I recommend getting the base idea polished up in the Ideas and Brainstorming forum before you try fixing the draft.
/forum/t-7559117/carnivorous-chair#post-
page revision: 3, last edited: 22 Sep 2018 03:57
