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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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'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...
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...
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 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...
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 ...
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...
Over the years I gained small audience and I love them. My last work quite disappoint them in regard of one character and I feel bad about it. I felt like character's struggle she went through woul...
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...
"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...
In our documentation of SQL functions and statements, we include a BNF-style syntax summary. As is conventional, we indicate optional elements in square brackets, like this: CREATE [IF NOT EXISTS]...
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...
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...
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...
In the question What can I ask my readers to help me and how?, a skeptical answer is provided: my blog which is about challenging existing dogmas is just an average. There are many cranky blog of s...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In this answer, Mark Baker makes a statement about story: All story ideas are basically a variation on one thing. A man (or woman, or child, or small furry animal) has two desires, both of which h...
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...
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...
Chuck Palahniuk is an author quite well known for writing first-person stories. He has a simple piece of advice for others who wish to do so as well: "Have your narrator say 'I' as little as possib...
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...
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...
This answer discusses how to choose between traditional print publishing, ebook publishing, self publishing, etc., and concludes by stating that You should publish your book using the channel wher...
Here's my question: can you pitch an outline of a novel to an agent? I.e. you have two to three chapters complete to a high standard and at full outline of the rest. Would any agents agree to re...
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...
I am working on a novel inspired by the Shahnameh - a Persian epic poem by Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi. The Shahnameh (the title means "The Book of Kings") is structured as a series of interconnected tales...
So, I was doing a writing excersie, I came up with, to help me with sentence structuring and developing my style. One thing, I ran into, however, was that I couldn't describe pain very well. Th...
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...
Inspired by this question, a more complex question: how can I have two simultaneous sequences of footnotes? For example, suppose I am translating a book. The book contains footnotes, numbered in s...
Good morning, This morning I have found an ad about a new TV serie, "See", which plot is quite similar (blind civilization with sighted-rare members, although environment and background is differe...
In this answer, Amadeus makes the case for happy endings based on their far greater popularity compared to unhappy endings. This leads me to wonder, what exactly makes an ending "happy"? Before I...
As much as I would like it, both in Worldbuilding and Writing, not every action is logical or "right". There are two types of this: Imperfect information: The character(s) lack vital informati...
In academic writing, several articles on the topic of writing papers denounce the practice of "announcing" the topic. As an example, if a paper were to read... The goal of this study is to not...
I’m planning a medieval-style fantasy epic in which a young protagonist is plucked from his humble life, acquires great powers, and ultimately saves his civilisation from the Big Baddie (a politica...
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....
Two characters (one is a PoV character) come up with a plan to break a third out of prison. They succeed, with only minor complications. If I describe too many details of their plan beforehand, it ...
I am writing a extra-terrestrial high fantasy novel. The story is completely set in an alien world. No visits from Earth and no visits to Earth. My characters are humanoids, who look like elves...
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...
What sites, libraries, or other organizations have strong, easy-to-browse collections of letters, diaries, and other primary sources that are great for authors doing research for historical fiction...
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 ...
I've set up styles so that my paragraphs under level 4 headings stick together. To this end, I've set "Widow/Orphan control", "Keep with next", and "Keep lines together" for both the 4th heading st...
"Albert, you're already drunk! Stop it!" she implored him. "Nah, if I stop drinking, I won't have an excuse to miss work tommorrow!" he joked around. I am wondering if it's possible to ...
It's not so much that I dislike my real name, but I have a few issues that make me uncomfortable with using it. This is mainly due to the fact that it's quite unique, and while that is an advantag...
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...
