-Errors in factual statements, location, time or props.

- Static, lengthy, or unnecessary descriptions.

-Poor transitions between scenes or chapters.

-Redundancy or wordiness.

-No sense of time, place or background.

-Telling rather than showing, whether in narrative or dialogue.

-Malapropisms (elegant/eloquent, eminent/imminent, delusion/illusion/allusion, further/farther).

-Clichés ("He ran like a bat out of hell.")

-Lack of sensory details (smell, touch, hear).

- Beginning sentences with too many ‘ing’ verbs.

-Repetitive use of person pronoun to begin sentences (I, He, She, My, We, They).

-Passive sentence structure ("The phone was ringing." "Voices could be heard.")

-Too many weak or conditional verbs (was, were, could, would).

-Excess use of adverbs ("ly" words) or qualifiers (very).

-Author or character intrusion (the author interrupts the flow to explain).

-Background or description "dumps."

DIALOGUE

-Not clear who the speaker(s) is until after dialogue.

-Weak, stilted, unusual or lengthy dialogue.

-Dialogue does not fit characters.

-Failure to give distinct voices to each character.

-Too many dialogue tags (he said, she said) or too many substitute tags (she offered, expounded, snapped, growled, muttered, murmured, exploded, complained, demanded…).

-Too many interruptive "beats" (drinking coffee, moving about, staring, combing hair).

PROTAGONIST

-No clear protagonist--or more than one protagonist.

-Protagonist not doing anything.

-Dull protagonist.

-The protagonist is saved (or the problem solved) by someone else.

CHARACTERS

-Cardboard, shallow, or one-dimensional characters.

-Inconsistent or flaky character behavior without explanation.

-Failure to establish motivation for actions of each character.

VIEWPOINT

-No clearly defined viewpoint character(s).

-Inconsistent or straying points of view in same scene.

-Too many viewpoint characters.

PLOT

-No clear-cut problem or goal driving the story.

-No serious obstacles standing between the character and his/her goal.

-Inconsistencies in plot.

-Plot difficult to follow (where is this story going?).

-Not enough emotion/tension/passion to keep the reader interested.

-No sub-plot.

OTHER

-Failure to balance dialogue, introspection, description, movement, exposition.

-Subject matter not well organized.

-Failure to bring together all the forces for a final showdown.

-Not tying up all loose ends.