Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, as the most prestigious academy in all of Equestria providing the most outstanding education, ends up being incredibly tough on its young students, with its high standards and rigorous exams. With one obvious exception: Twilight Sparkle, personal protegé of the Princess, exemplary student, and the overall incarnation of excellence and inquisitiveness.
But even a Twilight Sparkle isn't immune to failure. One bad report card and one bad grade can be enough to shatter her already fragile self-esteem.
Of course all of this could just be a mistake. There's just no other way. Surely, it had to be a mistake. And mistakes can always be fixed, right? Right?
Chapters (1)
a good premise
I thought this was very well done and heartwarming.
That was a good story. The teacher was a bit of a dick, but his house burned down so...
A great little story! I kind of wish Princess Celestia had a role in the end, but it did a nice job of showcasing why Shining Armor is so important to Twilight.
Nicely done!
Haha, loved it. You're a very good writer, and combining good writing with filly Twilight Sparkle is something I just can't pass up. The story was just a little melancholy and bittersweet, but hey, that doesn't change anything too drastically. Characterisation was spot on for the canon members of the show, and the grammar and flow from scene-to-scene was perfect.
You are both a gentleman and a scholar.
Hello, my friend! I’m FluttershyisMetal, from WRITE (a group of people who will review any story that we are sent, and others that we find as long as the author gives permission), and am here to perform a review for you. Without any further delay, let’s hop right into it, shall we?
Grammar/Formatting:
The grammar was typically pretty good, although there were some mistakes. These mistakes seemed to be just simple slip-ups, with the exclusion of some tense-issues found throughout the story. I will just point out a few of the outliers—but not all—that stood out the most to me. The tense issues shall be addressed at the end.
Here, you said ‘breath’ instead of the proper ‘breathe’. Be careful there, it is a fairly easy mistake to make. You also need to replace the comma with a semi-colon; you can’t connect two independent clauses with a comma.
The comma after couch is unnecessary. It kind of throws off the speed of the sentence.
‘Mr. Notes’ should be ‘Mrs. Notes’.
You can either change ‘rambling’ to ‘ramblings’ or say ‘was stopped’ instead of ‘were stopped’. If left as is, you’re combining a singular action with a plural description.
‘An’ should be ‘and’. Just a simple spelling error here, but one that I don’t see made to often though. Everyone slips up from time-to-time though.
The comma after carefully is unnecessary. Make sure that you have your editors search through the story for these things; it will sometimes go unnoticed if there are no explicit directions to look for stuff like this.
‘I’m’ should be ‘I’d’ and the ‘gonna’ needs to be removed. Worded like this, it sounds like Shining had just decided to stay the two weeks. The colon that you have before the actual dialogue is inappropriate, you could either replace it with a comma or a period, with the latter being the more appropriate of the two. Also, when you tell us ‘before answering the question’ it is much too wordy. Meaning that you are describing something too much; you are telling us rather than showing us.
‘Send’ should be ‘sent’ in this situation. Tense is an extremely important thing to do correctly when writing a story; if you aren’t consistent, people will get confused as to what time period the story occurs in. In addition to that, you are using a singular object, the combination, and a plural verb to describe that singular object, ‘send’.
Those are just a few of the grammatical errors found throughout the story, but there are others that I didn’t mention. I’d suggest going back through the story with your editor and maybe even pre-readers to ensure that these mistakes are weeded out.
Alright, moving on to the formatting of the story. You were generally pretty consistent with the formatting. However, there were some odd mistakes found in the story. The typical mistake was just adding in an extra space in between words. There was also an unnecessary line between dialogue from the same character.
Here, you put an extra space after the hyphen in ‘newly- gained’.
There should be a quotation mark after the period.
There is an extra space after ‘down’.
Why is there a line between these two sentences? They should be connected together.
Plot:
The story had a pretty interesting plot, though I am unsure of how original it actually was. It had the inclusion of a ‘Twilight botches a spell’ trope and an overreaction over a grade, which I am pretty sure has been done before.
That being said, you were still able to maintain my attention throughout the story, which is a really good thing considering that I am distracted easily. There were some contradictions within the story, however, which was fairly annoying. Nothing that was so terrible that it forced me to put down my computer for a while, just some inconsistencies here and there.
When you say ‘others’ you imply that she made more than one B+ or lower, whereas she only had one B+. You could simply change ‘others’ to ‘other one’ and it would be fine.
You say ‘stepped down’ but they were already on the ground. Unless Twilight somehow managed to step into the ground, this is impossible. Not to mention some not-so family-oriented implications.
When you say ‘learning’ you imply that Shining Armor doesn’t already know how to lie to his father. Yet, later in the dialogue, he says ‘Always has in the past’ which implies that Shining Armor has done it before and it has helped him.
Other than the mistakes I pointed out, your story had a pretty consistent plot.
Characters/Dialogue
Your characterization never veered into the territory of OOC (out-of-character) which is a major plus. I especially loved how you treated Twilight’s character; it is spot on with how I believe she would react to a situation like this.
Shining’s character was also an interesting one; I liked how you treated him as a brother, especially with the egging part. That shows that he isn’t a perfect pony, or a Mary Sue, and does have some character flaws.
The dialogue between the characters was often pretty interesting. There weren’t many instances of awkwardness within the dialogue, unless you include the issues that I have covered earlier. There really isn’t much to say about the dialogue, except that it was pretty well done.
Overall Rating:
Alright, this is going to be tough. I personally enjoyed the story, but there was an abundance of errors made throughout the story. The premise that you have behind it is good, you just need to execute better. If you can correct what I have pointed out (and the stuff that I chose to leave out) you will have a truly great story. I award this story 3/5 Pinkies.
~FluttershyisMetal, WRITE's Official Metal-Head
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*Grins and applauds* Very cute fun and fun. A really nice premise and well done n_n I have two small nitpicks. One I didn't really get a feel for the timeframes involved. Twi supposedly goes to visit him ungodly late at night but that wasn't really made clear.
Secondly small typo "stang" instead of stung.
Other than that really awesome. you even captured Shining being a twit nicely
Surely you mean 'Jane Mare'? Tsk tsk tsk.
Yeah, you're gonna need those eggs....