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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...
The way you make a character sound condescending it to have them say condescending things. That's it. That's the whole of the recipe. But I suppose you knew that. I suppose you must have tried tha...
You should consider what makes someone sound condescending. I know – that's pretty much what you're already asking. But I really think it's what's at the heart of your question. One aspect of peo...
In one chapter, the PoV character meets up with her sister. Her sister is supposed to be fairly stuck-up and thinks she's a complete lowlife, so she talks down to her the whole time. I have the Po...
There's a nice technique for this: have the character notice something is off, then either have them dismiss it with an unconvincing explanation, or distract them. This can be combined very well wi...
Essentially, you do need a speech tag if the reader can easily tell who is speaking. Under what conditions can the reader easily tell who is speaking: There are only two people in the conversatio...
Sometimes it doesn't matter who said what. In your example, where everyone has the same goals and is working together, it seems fine to leave most or all of them out -- the focus here is more on t...
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...
As is typical with tired language and cliches, the main problem here is not simply that the phrase is overly familiar, but that it is inappropriate to the scene. This is not a scene in which two pe...
What is wrong with it is that it is not idiomatic, as you note. Writing idiomatically is the important thing here. It really does not matter whether you can explain or justify an idiomatic expres...
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...
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...
Click is really the correct term. I know it is a made-up action description for a mouse or trackball. It requires on-the-fly mental replacement with tap when used with a touch-screen (phone, tablet...
I'm honestly inclined to agree that what Writing Codidact needs isn't really another data import. It's to get actual people to come here, read, contribute, and remain. People who have posted on Wr...
I don't know. What this place needs is not more data but more users. Bringing over a few more months of questions from SE would give the few of us who still check in here something to chew on for a...
When we set up this site we imported from SE as of the December data dump (the latest we had at the time). We didn't have a way to get the delta; the import code didn't use the API. We now have b...
Notice that you don't "click" a mouse. You point to an object with the mouse point and you press the mouse button. And the mouse button makes a clicking sound. Click is not an action, it is feedbac...
I am documenting features on a web site. The audience is end users, who could be anywhere from seasoned Internet veterans to relatively new people who came for my site's content but aren't general...
Like this answer, I don't think you need to use first-person to get into a character's head. I want to focus a little more on how to do that in omniscient third-person. An omniscient narrator can...
The "last activity" data on posts appears to be inaccurate. I just answered a question, but while the answer count shows my answer, the last activity data still refers to the time the question was ...
It is almost certainly just a really really bad idea and you should stick to either one. At novel length it has been made to work by people like Charles Dickens and Cormac McCarthy, but at short st...
If you do not want to disappoint your readers with the conclusive paragraph that leaves no lasting impression, order dissertation conclusion writing helpdissertation conclusion writing help from ou...
I'm working on a longish short story (I expect to hit somewhere around 5,000 - 6,000 words by the time I'm through) that starts out in third person omniscient POV, mostly because that allows me to ...
Brianna slouched in her seat, staring out the window, the worksheet on her desk forgotten. There were hundreds of things she could think of to do on a beautiful May afternoon, and none of them invo...
