General Q&A about the craft of professional writing, editing, and publishing. Questions about all types of writing are welcome -- fiction, technical documentation, scholarly articles, poetry, scriptwriting, blogs, and more.
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A little context for my question... A long time a go, I started writing little vignettes for a character I was playing in an RPG group. The vignettes ended up joining up and becoming sort of a ba...
Question 1 Here I am asking about merely reading and writing. Do human readers take longer to distinguish between stems (and bases) that share the same root, even if merely picoseconds? For exa...
In this article about different categories of heroes, Matt Bird states that sensitive and unlucky heroes are hard to write because audiences have a hard time caring about them. He says: American...
Are there any other "times" for introducing new content into a final paragraph? Have any other famous writers substantiate this bombshell? I was flabbergasted to read this para. because mo...
As a zipped web-page, EPUB has long offered the possibility of completely changing how a book looks and feels with dynamic content and interactive content. But since EPUB came out (2007), I really...
I've been working as a content writer and blogger for a few local agencies. I want to start freelancing this year but am slightly afraid to start. Could anyone help me how to start freelancing as a...
I am thinking of starting a blog and wondering how I should approach it. Is it better to have a niche blog or is general/miscellaneous content fine?
I've always struggled writing about myself, but I need to apply for a program and the application has a lot of very broad but personal questions like, Tell us why you would be a good leader Exp...
When referring to a paper with multiple authors by using the name of the first author and "et al.", how does one indicate possession? For example, is it correct to write, "Einstein et al.'s paper ...
We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and it has an annoying property: if you happen to have the shift key down when you type a space, it inserts a non-breaking space ( ). Our docume...
The Hugo awards are prominent fan awards in the SF&F genre. In 2021, I noticed that all of the finalists in the Novella category are from a single publisher, Tor.com. Novellas have, I underst...
I am very bad at writing children characters in my stories, I always make them either too "dumb" or too developed. Currently I am in need of believable child +- 13, boy or girl. Requirements: My de...
My SO and I were discussing the following sentence in his writing: This is the tale how once the Septemi helped King Nicodemus subdue walking firestorms, how we hunted cultists and mongrelfolk i...
"A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out t...
For projects with API documentation generated by Sphinx, I've noticed that some project's don't include links to the Parameter/Argument types (str, file-like object, int, etc) and some projects do....
I understand that I need not to be anxiety about any meetup - just come there and the conversation will flow to itself. However, after two meetups with two of my readers, I realize that I was quite...
Shorter sentences have been proven more readable. Thus why didn't the authors below sunder their lengthy sentences, prolongated by commas and (semi)colons? Why not divide them into shorter sentence...
I understand that if you’ve got two people speaking, you often don’t need speaker tags because it’s assumed that both people take it in turns unless otherwise specified. This keeps the conversation...
I have a serious problem. I am going to start writing a novel and it contains material from another religion. Something like this: my book involves Moses vs Pharaoh. Moses is only a mentor and not ...
We publish documentation online using HTML. For things like fixed parameter names and other code literals, we use <code> tags. My question is about styling these in tables. On our referenc...
This question deals with showing the emotions of characters when those characters are actively trying to hide their emotions. If the emotion is something subtle, like apprehension or annoyance, you...
This question was asked elsewhere by geneaux and is copied here in accordance with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license there. Right before the climax of my SciFi novel, there's a big reveal about who the b...
I am looking to get a better understanding of different categories of material written in a newspaper. I had assumed two main types: 1) News (i.e. reporting of facts) -> objective (not debatabl...
Suppose my fictional character is a plastic penguin which happens to be very pompous. What do you believe is a better way to name a character? 1.A name which describes them physically Ex. Plasti...
We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and the project is checked into git. (In case this matters, this is a locally-hosted git server, not GitHub.) The project uses a .gitignore file to aver...
So, I am writing a story based around a character that has the personality of a Computer. Emotionless, logical, does what he is told and if he can't or won't, will state it in the plainest way poss...
We use Madcap Flare to produce a large documentation set that contains many code examples (primarily SQL, but also C++, Java, and Python) and command-line operations. When the doc set was first pl...
Basically, I am writing a story and I want to know if the characters are diverse enough or too diverse. If I just state the characters' races, sexualities, etc, it might seem forced but I didn't re...
I'm trying to correctly refer to several calls. Meaning, in a singular call, we invite several proposals. Therefore, it's a call for proposals. In the case I need assistance with, my gut tells me ...
Dark protagonists. Heroes who are evil, pure flaws, or exhibiting only weakness or darkness, rather than strength or light. There is one basic assumption I would like to make about such characters:...
I am often in the situation where I would like to cite a source in another language, and as such include my own translation alongside the quotation. I have been told that translation is a form of ...
My character is using a hardly legible accent, or simply an accent which is not comfortable for a reader to read. For example: “Ye've caught us in th' middle o' supper. Seein' as how yer no bleedi...
I'm proofreading a novel - the brief has instructed that I do not make any stylistic changes, and correct only the obvious errors that impede sense/clarity. There are several places where I feel a...
Let's look at two characters who are generally considered to be iredeemable: The Diamond Authority (from Steven Universe): The extremely childish leaders of the race of spacefaring lesbian magical...
Some of my characters have little to no education, and I'm looking for ways to show that through their dialogue. (They're uneducated, but not necessarily stupid.) Here's what I've tried so far: ...
Are there hard and fast rules for characters speaking to each other? As far as quotations, or without them? Are they hinged inside a paragraph or ruled to only be in a talking string?
Shorter sentences have been proven more readable. Thus why didn't the authors below sunder their lengthy sentences, prolongated by comma + conjunction? Why not divide them into shorter sentences s...
I am sorry. Its a bit longer than necessary. So as not to put one entire page here, I cut a piece of the paragraph. Ian had difficulty expressing himself, so Lavi squat down in front of him, holdin...
I am writing a story in which at some point two characters with the same name interact each other. I can't use their last name to differentiate because it's necessary for them to have no last name....
I have a character which is typical street thug, criminal and did his time in jail. He is using a lot of underground Argot and thug slang. Example below At the end we got the ice, gravy train if y...
I am writing a book that is set in England, but because I would get the book published in America I don't know what terminology to use. My main character is in the equivalent of 7th grade but in En...
My novel starts with the three heroes joining a cattle drive. When they talk among themselves, it's obvious that they have some kind of hidden agenda. We'll learn more about thier secret mission ov...
Every piece of writer's advice I see will include something about "building a following" online, so that a publisher will be more likely to pick you up. The problem is, I don't have any idea how to...
I wrote a passage where one of my characters heard beats, (i.e., the sound) then he found the beating object and, when he held it in his hand, it started throbbing like a heart, (i.e., the feeling)...
I've recently begun investigating the publishing process, and what I as an author need to do to get my book read. I'm aware of the self-publishing option, but as I have not studied any options exte...
In the first discussion of the concept of "plot" given by [1] I, maybe, understood two different, but complementary, concepts of plot. Mckee gives us a definition of Plot as: To PLOT mean to n...
For the writing challenge, I'm currently writing from the point of view of a robot. Also another robot is frequently addressed. However I've hit a problem: Referring to the robots as “it” often giv...
In my post-apocalyptic story, the split of male and female main/supporting characters is 50/50. The girls and women in the story, Eris, Marina, and Ezrith, display very little emotion--Eris repr...
I have a piece of dialogue which sounds great in my head, and the way the character says it is important, but it never looks right when I type it out. At first I tried this: “Looking and lookin...
I have three variations of the same storyline and cannot decide which one I want to write: erotic story turning dark and dangerous A young adult man and woman fall in love. It is the woman's fir...
