You're attempts at writing like a child went too far and are too cutesy for this to work for me. I'm pretty sure the average ten year old has a better grasp of proper writing than this and there's no way that the foundation would use an average kid for something like this.
I agree with this, it encapsulates my feelings quite well.
Additionally, I have removed the 'format-screw' tag as it does not exist.
Some things I don't care for with the overly childish tone, but it does enough things right that I'm comfortable with a +1. The pacing is really good and this in particular jumped out as excellent:
Even Will agreed that it sounded more important-sounding, so he said sorry, but SCP 4259 was still upset so she [UNTRANSCRIBABLE]. We all tried to get her to give him back but she kept saying "Wrong Password!" and [UNTRANSCRIBABLE].
For a first entry, this is excellent.
Wow people comment on these quickly
Hi, thanks for all the feedback. I realize that "main site is for finished products" and all, but I am willing to iterate on this if people want to give me actionable things. Obviously if u think its unsalvageable then u think its unsalvageable.
this is pretty cool, if it gets deleted, it definitely deserves a rewrite of some kind imo.
rhinos am i rightos
As others have said, fix the tone to make it sound more like a 10 year old instead of a 6 year old.
For reference, when I was ten my grade participated in statewide story writing competitions where the winners were expected to have virtually perfect grammar in addition to a generally well organized and reasonably original paper.
Other than the tone, I quite like it.
Others will likely disagree with me on this, but if a skip is ambiguous and/or has a lot of redacted text I really like to have an author's submission statement explaining what they think is going on.
You know what's the most incredulous thing that this article do? No, it's not that researchers' kids are used to contain and document it.1 It's that these kids are not given computers to type the documents on this SCP, and that the transcribers retained the typos from these kids. A spell-checker would've cried blood when forced to faithfully reproduce these typos. And don't give me any bullshit like the wordings can't be edited without triggering the infohazard, because the inclusion of "[UNTRANSCRIBABLE]" is evidence that parts of the document could be edited and that verbatim copy is not absolute necessity when transcribing the document.
TL;DR the typos are unjustified, even discounting a 10 years old spelling capability.
I agree with many users here in that I think the tone is off for the age depicted. The average 10 year old should reasonably be able to write what may come off as an SCP document written without proper clinical tone. In addition, if a 10 year old misspells a word, they typically believe that their spelling is correct, and so will continue to use the same spelling each time they use the word.
Lastly, I get what you are trying to do with the redactions, but you have so many that I have a very hard time gleaning anything beyond "major infohazard" and "probably a child android of some kind". You don't give us nearly enough clues and subtle nods as to what this thing IS and what it does. This type of thing needs to be mulled over in the forums for a while if you ask me. I would put your sandbox page up there and ask for help. This is trying to be a 110-Montauk but without enough hints as to what the kicker actually is, so instead of being horrified by what this thing probably does when it gets upset, I just don't care.
Hi all, I've been in transit for a few days and haven't really gotten a chance to work on this. I am now back and can start thinking about reworking this properly tomorrow.
Reading over the feedback the obvious issue is Susie's stated age not matching her writing style. There's two ways I see to fix this, either change the stated age of the character or change the writing style. While either of these should be fine, I get the impression that the current writing style rubs a lot of people the wrong way for whatever reason (and also might not be that realistic for a 6-7yo). I think what I'm gonna do is make two versions in my sandbox, one which is the current version with age changed and the number of typos decreased, and one where I change the writing style to be more mature. I'm kinda concerned that doing this will necessitate changing some of susie's decisions and reactions to things since they might make sense for a 7yo but not for a 10yo. Once I have that I'll make a draft forum post and see what happens. Also this is gonna be a lot of work that I wasn't expecting to have right now so it may take a while.
For those of you that find the premise of this fundamentally unbelievable, yeah I get that but I don't think theres a lot I can do to alleviate that without fundamentally changing the story. I will point out that the Foundation in the story kinda agrees, since they decided to shut down this whole operation after reading this report.
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