Can someone, anyone help me out with this. I am writing a story and I am quite aware that it has grammatical errors, mainly the tenses. An annonymous reviewer has been hounding me leaving the most awful reviews, some of them were taken down by admin.

After that I have not recieved anymore, until today, the review is not as bad as before, but it still concerns me. I am at the point where I feel that I would disable annonymous reviews. However quite a number of the great reviews I recieved came from annon.

The awful reviews really hurt because I have been online countless of hours correcting the mistakes, I even had help from a beta. Spanish is my first language and I am trying to improve. Curious enough the chapter that was reviewed was edited by a beta, It makes me wonder why some one could be so malicious. Help! I need some sound advice.

Maybe making your story unreadable by unregistered people? That is the only thing I can think of that could help

The correct action, when you receive a review that you feel is a flame, is to take it to one of the Admins.

Unfortunately, I cannot see my way clear to deleting this latest anonymous review, merely because the person offered genuine critique. You state yourself that your story has errors... and all the person said is that it has problems with verb tenses.

If you do not wish any critique, you must post an author's note stating such at the beginning of your story. After that, anyone who offers critique will be in violation of our rules and such reviews will be removed, along with the offender being chastised.

I hope this helps!

~~Wiccan~~

I don't have any issues with the latest review. It's just that I am a little squeamish about it now because of past experiences. I don't want a repeat of what happened before, so I am just trying to find an amicable solution, if their is one.

Thanks for the info and the advice.

I know (believe me, I KNOW) that unkind reviews can really hurt. And some reviewers are just insane trolls who love to hate. But a reviewer who points out problems with grammar and spelling probably does not feel that they are being unkind at all, they just feel that it is important to use proper English. They want to help you write a better story. If all the reviews you get just say a story is great, it doesn't help you become a better writer. It's nice to get compliments, but it's really good to learn and improve, too. Really, it's a GOOD thing, not a bad thing.

Oh, and you should be so proud at being multilingual. I think that people who can speak multiple languages are brilliant!

Gracias por el cumplido! It means thank you for the compliment.

English is not my first language either, so I understand how difficult it can be to not only speak but read and write it fluently. There are things that I am still learning about it even though it has been my primary language since I was about six. It's actually my third language but my second spoken, lol. Sign Language is actually my first language and German my first spoken once I could hear.

What has helped me the most in improving in my use of tense, grammar and fluency is Schoolhouse Rock's Grammar Rock. It makes a lot of things easy to remember as well as understanding how to figure out sentence structure. You can watch the different grammar rock videos on youtube.

The songs and images make it easy to understand and remember. I often find myself humming or singing the songs while I'm writing. It may not fix everything, but it would probably help you as it has me. The other thing I use a lot to check myself is dictionary.com. no www at the front. If you are not certain about the proper tense of a word, check it with the dictionary and it will tell you how to spell it for past, present and future.

As for the nasty reviews, they are very hard to deal with. I have gotten ugly reviews on stories in the past (on a different site for a different fandom) that very nearly had me stop writing. The nice reviews were enough to keep me going but I do not allow anonymous reviews on any site any more. I do tell my readers that they can mail me or leave a note on my wall though. I have had several just send me a message. Maybe you could ask your anonymous reviewers to leave their thoughts on your profile instead?

I hope that it helps for what it's worth. Keep writing, and don't worry, things will get better.

~Starfyre