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Feature Request/Suggestion: Comments It could just be me, but I've noticed that there's a lot of space between answers. More than once, I've looked at a question and thought it wasn't answered, onl...
It's not the end of the world if this is not possible, but I would like to reclaim my content. The problem is, I no longer have an SE account of any kind. I asked them to delete my main account bec...
What do you want a blog for? If you just want to share your day to day life with the world, that's what Facebook and Instagram are for now. People who blog these days are either selling something o...
Writing in fuller paragraphs feels like it creates better reading flow, as opposed to short choppy chunks of text, but that's a prose consideration. For instructions, the primary goal is to help t...
I think that the answer, broadly, is that structure is necessary but not sufficient. You need both structure and vision. Yes, you can have works that don't follow conventional structures, or don'...
The way you've set it up, with C being a trusting character, if you want the Reader to know something is up, you find a sweet spot of them saying something that most Readers would get, but C does n...
You do not mention whether you're telling your story in first person or third, and if in third person - limited or omniscient. In third, your task is easier, since you have the narrator to mention ...
I've never subscribed to this notion that you should just start writing. Sure, depending on your level of skill and experience, some number of things about your first draft will probably be bad. A ...
Monica asked me to write up a 'what's on topic' text for a future help page, based on the SE on topic page. Below is what I have. Note that I have condensed the guidelines to follow and show more w...
This is technically difficult to do without being horribly slow. I can do you a random sort easily enough, but the "keep it around for a day" is where it becomes more challenging. As a compromise,...
I imagine, as Lauren says, you need simple sentences, but they don't have to be boring. Xiao Li lost his trousers. He politely asked his manager if he could return home for more trousers. His man...
Exposition is a problem for movies, because movies, generally, do not have a narrator. The audience sits and watches events unfold. But if the story needs the viewer to be aware of events that woul...
The model on SE was moderation, not curation. Nothing was ever removed. Duplicates, were marked, but never resolved. The only way any kind of curation occurred at all was through voting, and voting...
I'd have to read one of your first drafts – and probably get to know you a lot better – to understand what is wrong with the draft and how this happened to be able to answer your question in manner...
I'll offer a frame challenge here. Personally, I embrace the rewrite, and the deletion. I recently finished a long novel, a year-long project, and by my count, I read the whole thing twenty times. ...
Welcome to the resurrected (again) Writing Challenge! In line with previous ones, this includes a topic, a prompt, and also a challenge. Topic The topic of this challenge is a difficult jou...
It's too long, and it's filled with squishy prescriptions. Yes, we won't tolerate harassment. But I think it is a mistake to try and define every possible form of harassment. Make it a law of int...
The writing challenges we've done in the past were fun and helped us flex our muscles, especially if they nudged us into new types of writing. Let's bring those back! I have created the Challenge...
I just noticed that when you go to the users page and select the age tab, the start of the list is dominated by user names that are obvious spam. While they are not very effective because few peop...
This place is not exactly lively yet. That is not a surprise. But one quickly loses interest in visiting just to find nothing new day after day. Pretty soon you don't come back at all. What would...
Grammar is to writing as driving a nail is to architecture. Yes, you need the nails to be driven in straight, but it is not what architecture is about. A good writer is, first of all, a good obser...
In my book, Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process, I make a distinction between three domains of markup, the subject, document, and presentation domain. CSS is a presentation domain language. HT...
I'm sure this is on a list somewhere, but I didn't see a meta discussion about it, so I just wanted to be sure/make it official. Today I had a reputation change, but there was no notification lik...
I'm so glad you asked this question because, as a staunch desktop user, reading "tap" in a how-to guide irritates me no end. (No, the entire world is not doing everything on mobile now!) On the oth...
