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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In America at least, Haiku are commonly taught to students as poems having 5, 7, then 5 syllables, when in actuality, they have a structure of 5, 7, then 5 on. The NaHaiWriMo site explains what an ...
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...
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 recently noticed I use "after all" very often. But unlike other phrases, I never seem to find a way to replace it. Some examples: Like the books, they hadn't moved a single inch. Erin found t...
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?
What are the ways to practice and improve basic writing, like content and creative writing? I am not planning to write or learn to write fictional stories. By creative writing, I mean the essentia...
I'm (amateurly) writing the subtitles for an English TV show. I'll illustrate my question using a small example, but I'm hoping to receive answers as general as possible. One episode has a sentenc...
As technology and industry demands evolve, what tools/skills should one focus on learning/improving as a technical writer?
I have to confess that I find Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" to be a very tedious read. Can anyone recommend an alternative title that covers similar ground?
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....
Can someone please explain me the steps in writing a university assignment paper.
I need to know how to make my writing more brief without maring its original meaning and message. I have been struggling with that for a while, and still cannot do that. It simply seems to me that ...
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...
Beginner here. So, I have tons of ideas for a novel, and in fact I want to write one (even a series), but I'm struggling a lot in actually starting writing the story. I have ideas for characters an...
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...
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...
I'm interested in starting a pleasure project: a fantasy story, along the lines of a witch delivering a prophecy to a king about a dangerous and deceitful foe who will overthrow him, and the king e...
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...
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...
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 have a problem where I often proof my own writing and I don't catch all the errors while I am reading through it. I often miss entire words out of sentences or find myself repeating words. I can ...
I have a problem with the similarity index of one of my works since the plagiarism detector "Ithenticate" identifies θ-continuous as continuous. In my university, all that matters is the similarity...
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 ...
Over on the Judaism site, I summarized a narrative text in a block quotation. Because the narrative is well-known, I expected many people to skip the block quotation; therefore, I did not want it t...
"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...
Background To be honest, I really didn't know how to title this question. Anyway, the background. I was sitting around in front of the plan for the second book of my trilogy. Woohoo! I finished th...
This post is about Q&A websites in general. In StackExchange there is a culture of closing questions which do not reflect "the standards"; it's a culture that I as someone who uses SE since 20...
We produce a large HTML documentation set with the conventional two-pane view: expandable table of contents on the left, selected topic on the right. When you select a topic, if it has subtopics --...
We publish a substantial documentation set online. Each page has a place at the bottom that asks "was this helpful? (Y/N)", and if the person chooses "no" we offer a textbox. We collect all this ...
When documenting software API so others know how to access the various methods, what data structures are used etc, I like to document each bit in detail and also include, regardless of the coding l...
I am going to be writing some user-facing documentation for a database that visitors can query. That is, the people writing queries are not the ones who created the database; they can come in, look...
Even though discovery writing is about letting the story go without interference, you still don't want the characters to get killed in the first chapter. For this exists safety nets, people, objec...
So my fears are kind of taking over my enjoyment of writing my book because I feel I'm doing something wrong. In my story I stole ideas from other stories. I took the idea of Bioshock's infinite so...
I was asked to prepare an overview of an existing IT architechture and provide a document that consists of weaknesses analysis and suggestions on how each of the weak spots can be improved. How to...
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...
I have enjoyed writing prose for years and have a few short stories penned. I would like to build up to a novel but believe I have identified a potential weakness in my storytelling. My style is g...
I've been struggling for a while with my CV and I need help on deciding which sections should I include in it? I lack the formatting skill, I remember studying in school how to prepare my CV - ther...
Many word processors are capable to tracking and displaying changes made to a document. Those changes are typically displayed in special markup supported by the editor. E.g. But when using a pla...
Does anyone know of any blog tools that incorporate a timeline? What I'm essentially wanting to do is write little short mini stories about my life, but on each blog entry I'd want a timeline to ap...
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: "Americans...
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'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...
So in elementary school, I was told not to use Wikipedia too much because you can't trust what they write. So then for all the projects, I used the Canadian Encyclopedia, but then now, I really wou...
Software developers don't ever work in text editors, instead they use IDEs (integrated development environments) full of code assistance tools, etc. Why don't writers use similarly advanced writin...
My main character is up against the world, or, rather, the world and reality are up against her. A good story is in some ways defined by its villain. 1984 personifies its villain by adding a repr...
I wrote a short story here http://zecountess.deviantart.com/art/Mirrors-440990952 whose ending explains everything that is narrated before. The feedback I got from my readers is varied, and none o...
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...
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...
I don't understand the example emboldened below. Can't you add just a superscript number in the text, then in the footnotes cite that "minor case"? Unquestionably one superscript cannot "detract fr...
