Customer Relations

I like the concept of this story. The plot wasn't exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but it was funny nonetheless. In addition, your explanations of time continuity in the Grim Reaper's realm as well as the "laws of Anthropomorphism" were very interesting.

Although your idea of portraying Satan and The Grim Reaper as human-like figures just doing their jobs is very similar to an earlier Papertank submission ("Sympathy for the Reaper" by blamninja1), it's no less amusing. As a side-note, I think I also saw some inspiration from the LucasArts game "Grim Fandango" ... although I could be wrong.

Your writing style, in certain parts of the article, was also very good, from the comfortable and casual voice to your choice of words and sentence structure.

Unfortunately, other parts of the article sounded a bit awkward, such as the way you shifted from narrative to explanation when describing the whole Anthropomorphism thing. Also, many places could have used some improvements in sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.

There are some sentences that seem redundant, due to the same words being used more than once ("All there was in the room was a single table directly in the middle of the room..."), and other sentences that just seem a bit too wordy ("As Mr Reaper walked into the room he reached behind the potted plant, which I must add, as potted plants go was an unusual colour as it was totally black, like everything else in the room for that matter."), as well as a few missing words and missing apostrophes.

The typos, and most of the other problems, can easily be fixed by copyediting, and I tried not to let that affect my scoring of the article, which is why I've reluctantly given this submission a thumbs-up. However, there are also a few annoying run-on sentences, and a lot of other places where a particularly long sentence (even if grammatically correct) really should have been split into two sentences for the benefit of the reader.

As I already pointed out, some sentences are just too wordy or difficult to get through -- and whether it's because they need more commas, or simply because they need to be shortened, you should look into fixing that. Descriptive language is good, but don't over-do it. I'm sometimes guilty of this myself.

I wasn't sure whether I should give this a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, as I saw several problems, but very few of them were due to a lack of creativity or effort, and most could be fixed by proofreading a bit more. (Perhaps reading it out loud would help you figure out what doesn't sound right.) All in all, despite all my criticisms, I enjoyed the story. Keep improving your writing and I'll keep coming back for more.