Review Checklist pt 7 – Writing Style and Wrap-Up

And here we reach the final sections. Writing Style is a slider… Wrap-Up is just an extra category that I created to let me talk about stuff that didn’t fit elsewhere.

WRITING STYLE

• Did the writing style suit the material?
• Were action moments quick and zippy, appropriate to an action scene? Were dramatic moments slower, lengthier?
• Was it overly descriptive and novelistic? Or did it feel like a screenplay?
• Was it evocative, helping you as the reader feel the scene, or did it just describe?
• How was the spelling?
• Sentence structure
• How smoothly did the script read in general and how well were the actions described

(Writing style is NOT the most important aspect of the script. If the other areas are lacking, all the quality wordsmithing in the world won’t save it. Something about “polishing a turd“…)

OVERALL/OTHER

• Room for whatever other thoughts come to mind
• Could talk about the “experience” of reading the script – regardless of plot holes or thin characters, what was the experience like?
• Are there “trailer moments”? Does every sequence have one? Does every scene? (“trailer moments” being those moments that could be thrown in a two minute trailer and would have an audience saying “Yeah, I have to see this”)

And that’s it. That’s my review checklist. Keep in mind… these are all prompts. Things to send me, the reviewer back into the script with questions to answer. Without the prompts, I tend to just flail around trying to come up with things to say. With the prompts, it’s all laid out in front of me.

Next up: A review I delivered on Talentville for writer Scott Vasey for his script “The Snake”.