At the graduation ceremony of the School of Friendship, Applejack is suffering from a midlife crisis. It feels like everything is changing all around her, and the apple bucking farm pony can't keep up. However, with a little reminder from her friends, including the School of Friendship's first valedictorians, Applejack is reminded of the important lessons she has learned and the important contribution she and her friends have offered Equestria. Change is important, and it's easier to settle on that when she knows that the future of Equestria is in good hooves (or talons) with The Next Generation.
Chapters (2)
Heyo. I am by no means qualified nor extremely experienced, so feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt. Here are my thoughts:
Overall, I think it's a pretty solid work. I'm not a professional editor, so I'm pretty sure I didn't catch everything, but I noted the errors I found and the rough location of them. I'll go over some of my thoughts first.
I think the pacing of the story is something you might want to look at. Right at the opening, you describe in pretty good detail a flock of geese flying around, but the story really isn't about them. Be mindful of this, because do you want the reader to spend a good portion of the story picturing a flock of birds or picturing the ceremony itself?
There also seems to be a fair bit of repetition. I understand wanting to go into detail, but keep in mind that not everything is going to need a bunch of details. Using the opening paragraph as an example, would it suffice to say something like "A flock of geese flew over Ponyville in a loose, ball like formation. As they desended, they almost hit two ponies walking down the main road" instead of using a big paragraph? Granted, if you're using this to set up the scene its understandable, but given the scene shifts pretty quickly to the graduation I'm not sure if this is the right move.
On another note, your sentence structure seems a bit odd. I had a few sentences stick out to me, for example this one: "A certain area behind the stage and to the left, if facing towards the stage, flashed red for a few seconds." Grammatically, this is correct, but it seems to be a bit lengthy and has a lot of detail for something that, overall, doesn't add all that much to the plot. I get that you're trying to get the reader to picture exactly where Starlight is referring to, but the level of description seems more fitting when someone is actually giving directions in dialogue. "To the left of the stage" would work, since it's already implied that they're facing the stage.
I think you'd benefit from looking at a few longer sentences and see if you can break them up into smaller pieces. This might help with the flow of the story as well. Also, you use a lot of modifiers in your story, like italicized text, bold text, or '-ly' words. Bold text can be conveyed just by saying the character 'shouted' something, and italics can be conveyed by saying the character 'stressed the word.' Bold text and italic text is also pretty subtle, so if you do things like italicize half a word it might go unoticed. And with '-ly- words the general consensus is to use as few of these as possible as often times they're just not needed.
Applejacks' accent is fairly inconsistent throughout the story. For example there's a few times where she drops her g's in '-ing' words but a few times where she doesn't. It only happens a few times and should be pretty easy to fix.
Oh, and I don't know if you know this, but if you want to do a scene change or time skip, you can use a line break by either typing the command [ br ] without the spaces or by pressing the line button on the text editor (next to the numbers option and the link option). It looks like this:
Anyways, that's all I've got. If something I said doesn't make sense or if you have any questions feel free to ask for clarification, and keep in mind this is your story, not mine, and this feedback is just one idiot's opinion.
Deuces.
Typos/grammatical notes:
- temperature is said twice, paragraph one
- the phrase 'and that have' doesn't make sense, you don't need the 'and' here, paragraph five
- comma should be after 'fun,' not 'but,' paragraph six
- for a song title, you typically want to pick one form of punctuation: either have the text italicized, in quotations, or very rarely underlined. Italics are more 'correct' in formal writing but quotations are acceptable in casual writing (I think). Point being having the text italicized, quoted, and underlined is kind of overkill, first paragraph after the break
- Applejack is only talking to Starlight here, so 'y'all' might not be the right word as that implies she's apologizing to more than one pony.
- 'grew small' is kind of a contradiction, maybe use the word 'shrunk' here instead? Fourth paragraph after the break
- On the subject of ellipses (the '...'): use these sparingly, putting in too many breaks up the story for the reader. That was something pointed out to me awhile ago
- missing a space after Starlight's line, eighth paragraph after the break
- Stating that Rainbow pulled her wing away from her face while saluting is a bit redundant, because by definition that's what a salute is, thirteenth paragraph after the break.
- when you say 'certain things could have gone better during this ceremony,' that makes think that a lot has already gone wrong. But we don't know what happened before AJ and RD showed up, so this seems strange to me. 16th paragraph after the break
- I think you can get rid of the phrase 'minus Rainbow Dash and herself' because saying the 'other faculty' are there implies she's not referring to herself or Rainbow, fourteenth paragraph after the break
- the phrase 'next to Rarity's right' confuses me. I think just saying 'on her right' suffices, fourteenth paragraph after the break
- You've started the first sentence of three paragraphs in a row with 'Applejack.' You might want to change this for variation, thirteenth fourteenth and fifteenth paragraph
- You start to repeat yourself a bit with Rarity here. First you tell us that she is a fashionista in two different ways, then you show us that she's a fashionista with an eye for detail.
- the 'are' in the phrase 'the first students are graduating from the school" is missing something. Maybe add a 'who' in front of the 'are' or a 'that'
- 'me and Rainbow Dash' should be 'Rainbow Dash and I.'
- 'griffin' should be 'griffon' in the line where Rarity talks about Gabby
10030085
Thank you. I incorporated most of those changes into the story, especially the technical ones like "temperature temperature ". Those were very strong flaws that needed quick correction.
It may be that I put too much attention on the birds on the first chapter. I put that there because of the complaint someone else made about another one of my stories about setting up scenery. He seemed to imply that a good method is to start with a big scenery (like outer space in Star Wars opening) then gradually move down to the smaller scene. The idea behind this paragraph is to have the "camera" of the story focus on something as it's gradually brought down to the main characters, characters which later directly interacted with the birds a short while later. This follows the same trope as the opening scene of the movie "Forrest Gump" with the focus on the feather falling through the air which eventually lands and collides next to Forrest Gump's shoes. It's true that the birds aren't the focus of the story, they are merely the set up.
Long sentences can be argued that it's my artistic style, but you aren't the first to suggest something like this so I'll give it more thought as I go through the story again or with future chapters I write for anything else. Writing with short sentences instead of long is like painting with many tiny brush strokes instead of long, elegant curves, but both styles are legitimate styles of art. Short attention span on the part of the readers is the reason this suggestion came at me from elsewhere. The only difference between you and the other person who spoke of a similar subject is that other person recommended short paragraphs instead.
I'm now gaining more positive feedback recently so I must be doing something right. I got more likes in one day then I have with another fic of mine which is posted for almost a year, but I always aim to improve so that my readers can enjoy themselves more.
Would somebody care to tell those of us who haven't read those two stories yet what they have to do with this one?
10033004
Nothing, which is kind of the point. The message is to alert people that reading this story is safe to read as it is independent of spoilers for the other two stories I wrote. The note is also to inform about the existence of the two stories, for those interested to check it out. For those who like this one, they might be interested to check out the other two stories I wrote out so far.
Honestly, I'm not going to keep on doing that if I start to write out hundreds of stories on this site. For now there is only three, so I figured it might be useful if they advertise each other.
Your story has been reviewed!