There is one fanfiction (name not mentioned) that gives an interesting example. The story is quite good -- but somewhere around the middle, somebody must have given him a thesaurus, and mentioned that using "said" all the time was not optimal. From that point on, the writer used "droned" instead. This might be appropriate once in a while, but a lot of the speeches were things best not droned. ("Damn you!" Fred droned.) That's silly. "Said" is one of those invisible words, like "a" and "the".
Ouch. That's outright painful.
If the first page has obvious problems, the manuscript can be stuffed into the return envelope with a polite rejection slip, and sent back.
Lord of the rings.
Ok, it's not language that is the problem, just hideously boring first half of the book. Still, it feels like the perfect book to use "drone" a lot, either in it, or describing it.
Characters can be important, but they're not always that important.
True of course, but generally a good story AND great characters both together makes for a much better experience.
The protagonist of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero was the theory of Special Relativity. The people were there to give it human interest.
Mmm, a story can be just fine or great with zero characters, and at the other side of that spectra, the extremes of characters without story, there are slice of life and comedy stories with barely a hint of story in it, that also manage to still be very good.
All of it CAN work, but most of the time, i think having both is preferable.
Offhand, I'd be tempted to give scores for story and writing.
I would still prefer to add Characters as a score, as it varies so greatly, but yes, Writing is much better than Grammar.