Link to character workshop topic:http://wizardingrealm.net/index.php?showtopic=11883
Rank Applying For: Novice
At least three of your recent role play topics:
YAY PUDDING!
A Bad Habit
On The Way Back
Why you feel that you should move up: I'm not the best, in fact I'm quite certian of it. But I do try very hard to have a lot of content in my posts. I always have at least two paragraphs, and I do read them and correct any small errors I might of made. I'm also pretty active with my posting. I've made several threads, these three being the half people have responded to as of yet.

Hey, I'm Eol, and I'm here to help you on your quest through the Ranks system! We're glad you've applied, and we'd love to help you improve.

Your reasons for moving up sound great. Don't worry about considering yourself "the best"--you do really well at a lot of things, as you'll soon see. Besides, we value interest in improvement above all else here. =)

profile

22B is an AU size, right? Here in the States and the UK they use a slightly different system (and the equivalent 44B is HUGE), so it might be more clear if you just described her proportions with words instead of numbers.

Her personality looks good. Try to tie it in a little more with her history, and beef up her history if you can--focusing on happy events that made her who she is, however minor, along with the sadder ones you already have.

You can always add more detail as long as you keep it in an easy-to-read progression. Think about everything you notice about a person you know well, and make sure you have those areas covered in your physical and personality descriptions.

posts

So far your posts have been well-written and start off simply--not a lot of baggage, an excellent thing to see. You stay true to her personality very well. However, phrases are occasionally awkward or have an extra comma here or there. Make sure you read them aloud if you have any doubt--it'll show you where they aren't fluid, like when you use the same term "KO" in your description that Katherine would use informally speaking.

Before you rank up to Intermediate, I'd like to see you think about starting long-term plots, and it'd be nice to see you make some edits to her character sheet as well, chronicling how she's started to grow. Put her out of her comfort zone!

Approved for Novice

Thank you very much. I try not to make plots terribly complicated since I have made enough in character contacts for bigger plots. I'll trying working on the plot.
Ohh, I was using american measure, but mistyped. She's 28B.

Hi, my name's Jax, and I'll be your second reviewer this fine evening :D

If I could give you one piece of advice to make your profile better, it would be to cut back on your comma usage. Here's an example of how you can go this.

goes to

It doesn't have to work quite that way, but you get the idea- rewrite your profile so you need fewer commas.

As for your posts, careful with homophones (i.e., two/too/to) and turns of phrase (intense purposes is supposed to be "intents and purposes"). Again, cut your comma use in half. Your character is quite good, but you need to pay attention to writing style.

Still, you're approved for Novice. For the future, build plots, cut comma use significantly, and be careful with your wording.

I'm approved for novice, but it still doesn't say I'm a novice, and won't let me access novice forums.

You need three approvals to rank up. Someone will be along to do that soon. Just hang tight, and remember that you shouldn't be posting in this thread except to add a new rank application.

Okay, I'm going to make this pretty quick because Jax and Eol have already covered the things that really stand out to me.

As you work towards Intermediate, one thing that will be really important will be your writing style. Your post length is good and you include enough detail for the other person to react to, but I've noticed a lot of simple spelling and grammar mistakes. Try running your posts through Word to catch some of the spelling errors and read aloud and take pauses for commas to check for grammar and awkward wording. Also, remember to capitalise the names of the Houses at Hogwarts. =)

One thing that I really like about Katherine is that you have her interacting in a variety of situations with different characters. Try to keep RPing with members from different Houses. I love the interaction Katherine has with Mina Cordova, a pureblooded Slytherin. Perhaps you could further plot with her and explore the facets of prejudice a half-blooded student might face as she interacts with rather zealous purebloods. As you explore more about her personality and find out more about her, add this to your profile.

Just to reiterate what Jax said, please don't post in your profile topic until three members of the Review Team have had a chance to review. =)

Anyhow, sorry for the wait. Approved for Novice! Up you go.

Link to character workshop topic: http://wizardingrealm.net/index.php?showtopic=11883
Rank Applying For: Intermediate
At least three of your recent role play topics:
-- where the [wind] blows.
Andrew is studying at night and runs into Katherine who got lost. Katherine has a ton of inner commentary about how he's a cute shotaro boy.
SOUMIS AU SILENCE
Caspian starts to play the violen. Katherine in a sleepy stupor bails out of the noisy Gryffindor commons room finds him. Lots of outer commentary is made by the Gryffindor about the French accented Slytherin bishounen she has found.
Cracking Books
Katherine is tutoring Abby in Ancient Runes. Lucy walks in on them.
Why you feel that you should move up:
Cause I'm bored and technicalities in The Clash are bringing me down.
I've gotten the hang of interacting more fluently with different roleplayers and mirroring there post lenghs. I'm getting less grammar mistakes in there too and have repeatedly edited a lot of my mosts to take care of mistakes I may of missed when I originally posted it. I've also edited and updated my profile a bit. Adding some points and traits based on the suggestions from this thread as well as some personality trends my character tends to exhibit. Though these threads aren't exactly finished yet, these are some of the most enjoyable ones I've been doing so far so I did sort of want to show these off a little bit as well.

The one of the three stories interconnects Katherine with two other female characters who have already met her and each other in character. Abby especially was established as one of my characters official 'friends' whom I've done two previous roleplays with (one introduction of the two roleplay, and another one in which Katherine shows a more personal level of aquaintance with her). The other character was sort of treated with the opposite effect. Also, the onexones with Andrew and Caspian are parts of seperate plots where Katherine indiscretely figures out some more secretive parts of their natures and past (considering the Gryffindor's personality, I find her quite well suited for such roles).

Special Request:
Legilimency
Protection Vest
Sticky Bracelets
Justification:
The Legilimency not very strong of course, she has very light levels of it that she might subconciously use. This of course makes a more practical view of how very insightful she seems about people and how they seem try to pretend to be something else (though most of it would be general guesswork). This especially would move towards her character if she later discovers it, she probably wouldn't actively use it because it would be 'boring' if she could simply read someone's inner layers rather then make them express it themselves. I like to make it know, that even though she is not very good with transfiguration, she does favor using illusion charms. This added with Legilimency later could probably have her use a more unique skill sort of like the Day Dream products they sell at Weasley's Wheezes. It would also help for a spell I'm thinking she'd have fun using in which she casts an illusion on someone that makes them appear increasingly ugly based on there own inner darkness, vaniety, or other highly undesirable traits.

For the vest, it's often mentioned that my character usually wears a bright red vest. I was thinking that it would actually be a Weasley's Wheezes item from the protection section that repels minor jynxes and hexes.

The bracelets are something that's offhandedly mentioned before, basically bracelets she wears to help her keep a grip on some of her things. She often carries large numbers of books and is also quite clumsy so it's just something she thought would be useful.

Hello there. It appears that I shall be your first reviewer.

Right off to bat I have to say that your application is hard to read. No, formatting is not a necessity, but it can only help you. Having an application that is easy to look at helps reviewers so much, and really makes your application just look better overall.

I find it odd that you have a typo in a sentence where you are talking about how you have less grammar mistakes and have been editing things. Just by your app I would not guess that.

In your profile workshop please keep your original profile. When you make changes make a separate post so that we can not only see the updated profile, but also what you had before that. This way we can properly review how you have been editing your character.

Not knowing what your profile looked like before it's going to be really hard to see how you've improved. In any event I'm going to focus on what you have.

Commas commas commas. A lot of people get hung up on commas. It's a very common trend that you should really work on getting out of. My advice is to read whatever it is you're typing aloud, be it your profile or a post. If you don't need a pause there when you're speaking then it doesn't need a comma. When you read your profile with all of the commas it has now it comes across very choppy. For example:

Not very tall
Katherine is about 5'3"
Relatively slender
Her legs are longer than her torso

Find a way to make your sentences flow better.

Tell me more about Katherine and how she looks. I like that you gave me a little background in her appearance with the comment about swimming. Give me more of that. Your character's background should typically have shaped a lot of their appearance and personality. There should be a reason for the way they are, the way they dress, and so on. Give me more. Right now you're giving me some very basic details. Don't just list off physical attributes, describe them to me. Paint a picture of her with words.

On to the personality. You have some run on sentences in there, like the very first one. I also see a lot of spelling errors. Always run things through spell check. Word has one, firefox has one built into the browser, and I know for a fact there are free ones online. Anyway, enough about that. The content. You have some good things going here. But it feels sort of jumbled. Why is she bittersweet? What is it about Katherine that makes her bittersweet? You just sort of said she was bittersweet and never actually explained it. Details are love. Again, don't just give me a bunch of words about what she's like. You start to give me some background with why she explains things a lot. Do this more. Don't just tell me what she's like, expand on it and tell me why.

In general her personality reads very boring to me. I'm not sure if it's what you're telling me, how you're wording it, what, but she just comes across as rather bland and uninteresting. It doesn't really make me want to read more about Katherine. What is it about her that makes her stand out? Why should I care about her? Find these things and highlight them. Make me care about Katherine.

I'm not going to touch the background for now. I've given you a lot to work on for now. I am denying you for Intermediate. Your enthusiasm is great, but I need to see more improvement before approving you.

Even though the fact that I'm denying your rank up means your special requests are automatically denied I wanted to comment on them. Firstly, Legilimency cannot be used subconsciously. It is not a gift, it is a learned ability.

So, in the next two weeks, work on making Katherine a unique character who people will care about. Work on spelling and flow and going into more detail.

Well, I'm in the middle of my quantum homework, and not even connected to the internet, but I'll start this anyway.

Profile:

- I hate to come out and ask this, but is English your second language? I've mused that some of your tone could be indicative of a non-native speaker, but this reaction to you saying she has "median oval shaped eyes" - median is NEVER used in that context, while the similar-sounding "medium" or the similar-meaning "average" would be. This to me suggests an odd misunderstanding in usage.

- Again, you should describe things with words instead of numbers- I'm referring to her bust size, again. 28B, to me, implies "skinny and flat". People I know who wear 30Bs can go braless with no discomfort. If you're so invested in Katherine having a bust, you might as well give her a complex about insisting on wearing a Real Bra even though 28B is almost impossible to find in proper bras. I have a hard time buying that a single dad would go so far as to take her to a custom bra fitter- I know my dad conveniently goes to the other side of the store when my sister's looking for new bras. Come on, you have to remember being a skinny little kid just growing into your body, you're only four years older than your character.

- You still have problems with your punctuation. Either your comma use from before isn't fixed, or you fixed it by chopping things up into sentence fragments, which isn't proper usage either.

Topics:

where the wind:

Let's see, nitpicks first: plurals NEVER are written "plural's". Also, please don't use words if you don't really know them. "dawianistic"!? um, I guess I think you mean "Darwinistic", which isn't a word either, but would actually make sense here.

You're trying to bring out interaction here, which is a good thing. However, it comes off stilted and sounds like you're projecting what you can read into Katherine's knowledge, which is blurring the OOC/IC line at best- for someone who's going fishing to figure out what's bothering Andrew, she sounds like she knows way too much about the situation.

Your spacing and format could also use work- I'd prefer to see

"Blah blah blah," Bob said, "but blah blah blah."

than

"Blah blah blah."
Bob said,
"but blah blah blah."

The above is both more compact and more correct. Think about the formatting you see in fiction, and apply it.

SOUMIS:

"exuburating from the boy"!? I do not think that word means what you think it means. "Emanating" might be more accurate- "exuburating" is a corruption of "exuberant", or "joyful", and Caspian is, as described in detail, not playing joyfully!

Your French... isn't that great, to be honest. You'd probably be better off using the "Megatokyo technique" as I've dubbed it- when you're speaking another language, put the <words in brackets like this>.

Cracking:

Again, commassssssss. Why why why are you abusing the poor commas (I'm writing this at 2:30 am after studying for 6 hours straight, can you tell?) Again, simple spelling errors, in the first sentence! "rediculous". There is nothing stopping you from going back to clean up your posts in RP, particularly if you're going to be applying for rankings. Hit the edit button and pick out your spelling errors!

Comments:

I noticed you edited out Winds and Words, but I've got some commentary on that. I am ultra-disappointed in that topic, if only because I can see what could have come out of it. Call me biased, but when faced with some hooks for interesting interaction- "what the hell are you doing smoking in a deserted cemetery in the middle of the night talking to a crucifix?" for one- you managed to make it boring. I also saw the interchange between you and Eol, and from that I think that you misunderstand the concept of mirroring. It is not about length at all- it's about supplying action and conflict. I don't think Winds and Words can be turned around now, but you need to do that in all future threads.

Also, there is something that deeply bothers me about your voice, and I'm having a hard time placing it. Perhaps it's that you haven't gotten down the art of sentence length yet- there is a middle ground between run-on sentence and fragment, and you're struggling to hit it. It might also be that you try using words you don't understand well enough to spell or use correctly. This can be difficult when you're trying to play a character who thinks differently from you. I'm not even just talking about IQ, I'm talking about mode of thought. Katherine seems to me to think in a more verbose fashion than you're comfortable with.

Please, for the good of your RP, back off on the vocabulary. You're trying to play a smart character here, and when you misuse $5 words, it reflects more poorly on Katherine's intelligence than using some well-placed $1 words.

After that, and Kaela's review above, you know what's coming next: denied for Intermediate. You have a LONG way to go, and I suggest starting with working on sentence structure and cutting out misused words. Then, move on to giving more cues.

Oh, and talk proportionally less about her socks. I wear interesting socks too- either they're mismatched or handknit or kneehigh with skulls on or day-glo orange fencing socks- but when people interact with me, they don't want to only know that I'm wearing interesting socks! They also notice my body language, my tone of voice, how I move around the room- in fact, they notice that more.