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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Our documentation set includes some diagrams, such as entity relationship diagrams and flowcharts, where text is integral and cannot reasonably be handled in callouts. Our documentation is translat...
As I understand it, when considering the Three-Act Structure, the first half of Act One prior to the Inciting Incident is used to show the reader the 'Ordinary World'. In the story I am working on...
Question : In my screenplay, the main character occasionally suffers quick flashes, like visions. I have been unable to assert if I am formatting these correctly. Please also note the single and do...
I'm planning for my next podcast to do an episode-by-episode tv show analysis. (Actually two are in development, but they'll be about different shows.) I'll be the main researcher/outline-assembl...
In the modern world, english is a well-estabilished technical and scientific language. Some terms have become so commonly used that they are accepted in my native tongue (words like "computer", "PC...
I know that it breaks the general format of essays and that you should generally not include diagrams in essays. I just find it hard to keep clarity for parts that can be misunderstood, if interpre...
For my pathfinder game I write session updates after each session. I have previously asked about How to write exciting updates? This question is about the planning phase for writing these updates. ...
I ask as somebody who loves Writing Excuses (https://writingexcuses.com), and relies on the podcast heavily as an educational resource. My writing ambitions are well aligned with their stated scope...
In the point-of-view culture in my story, all of the women in priestly families have two-syllable names beginning with vowels. (There are reasons for this, but they're completely tangential to my q...
A friend and I are writing a story based on our characters. We brainstormed some ideas and now we know what the basic idea of our story is going to be. But I'm having a little trouble with the pro...
Many recommend the Hemingway app, which pushes simplicity and the lowest possible reading level. Where I live, an illiterate person is defined as any person who reads below a grade nine level. The ...
I'm currently writing a report where I have a table stating certain parameter values and their errors. Obviously I want the report to look nice, but since the errors of certain parameters vary by o...
I generally use PowerPoint for outlining my scenes (prose, not script). I put a general description of what the scene is on the slide, and then give more details in the notes section. I like that I...
This is inspired by a few things that have been breaking my immersion when reading Worm. The main protagonist is a teen, and most chapters are first-person POV, so grammatical casualness fits. I ...
As somewhat of a follow-up to my previous question: How to create a consistent feel for character names in a fantasy setting? Once I have named the characters in a given setting, how do I create p...
I'm trying to show that the narration (third person limited) is being interrupted by the character's thought process, and I'm not sure what punctuation is best for this situation. So far, I've tri...
Faith is defined as a belief in God based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Religion and science can be seen to oppose one another due to conflicts between people of those practices. In ...
How can I smooth the transitions in this text? I feel like the POVs are changed quite a lot which makes it fairly confusing for readers to understand. To elucidate your points, please feel free t...
I love accessibility, so any show that is 100% scripted, my script = the transcript, and I'm happy to share it. For podcasts with a cohost, there's no easy transcription software, and fiverr is ac...
I was recently updating some of my Stack Exchange profiles and I remembered how much I hate writing about myself. It isn't just Stack Exchange profiles either. It's resume cover letters. It's colle...
When we speak sometimes we draw out certain sounds for emphasis. We also see this technique in song, for both emphasis as well as expanding the meter to make the words fit a certain rhythm. One w...
Consider the following text: Tania is in her living room, in the summer. She looks to the window and the street in front of her house, then she realized how dry and parched they are, this ma...
Most authors use dialogue in writing, especially when writing fiction. Now, if I remember my first grade primary school correctly, dialogue can be directly separated from narration in a number of w...
Writing. There comes a time in my daily routine. I get a striking idea. A topic to write in my blog. A pondering about a specific event that happened hours ago. As a working professional (not as a...
I live in the publishing hinterlands. I was reading some query letters that worked and one thing they had in common was mention of attendance at a conference. What benefits could a membership give...
I'm using online sources for an essay for my DE History course, and we're required to use in-text citations when we quote or paraphrase sources, with the format of author-page number, like (Johnson...
I'm writing a scene in which four characters play a high-stakes poker game. So far my narrator has been an omniscient third person, who just does not wish to enter into the characters' heads. I st...
My intention is to write a novel that falls into the "contemporary fiction" genre. Also, maybe, the "family drama" subgenre, if such a thing exists. I have a plot point that puts one of my characte...
Punctuation (and spelling and capitalization) in text messages is different from punctuation in other forms of written communication (emails, memos, standard prose). In particular, punctuation, o...
I am interested in writing a story about real life events, but changing it in such a way to make it a fiction novel. Question is, do I need permission from someone to make a character based on them...
What punctuation is missing from English that might solve your writing issues? People may be able to come up with established ones that meet your criteria, such as the /s to indicate "that last...
Recently while doing some world-building for a role-playing game with a friend we were seriously struggling with naming character consistently. By consistently I mean make the names feel as though...
I am writing a science fiction story (actually a screenplay for a film, but I imagine that for the purposes of this question the same rules apply) and I have been told that it isn't really science ...
Increasingly often, if you Google for a recipe your search results will be full of long, image-rich blog posts that, somewhere in there, have the actual recipe you were looking for. Many of these ...
I am a master's student, and English is not my native language. To review and edit my thesis in English, I need an online reliable English proofreading and editing service. What do you suggest...
In How to write strong female characters, Standback says that the best way to write a strong female character is to make her uniquely female, the type of character that can not possibly be male and...
Question : How many blank lines should be before scene headings and secondary scene headings in a screenplay? Note that I am using Amazon Storywriter. Detail : I am writing a screenplay with Amazo...
I am playing around with cover art ideas and have some that are quite interesting. I have added a brief tag line, not quite a subtitle, to the cover to indicate the genre. Frankly, the artistic pho...
Be it Mowgli and balu singing Bare Necessities or Enrique singing Somebody's Me, each song (or poem) has their way of being sung. Were such songs written after selection of musical note, tone, and ...
Is Sentence A an acceptable and clear way of shortening Sentence B? Sentence A: A firm outperforms (underperforms) the industry when expression (1) results in a positive (negative) value. S...
Writing my memoirs. I would like an opinion on how best to include 4 pages of letters/fax/emails. How about a 20-page composition? as addendum/exhibit? Too long to include in manuscript? Thanks for...
This is more for my own curiosity than anything else but I was wondering if when reading about a character with no specified gender and no description of their looks, does the choice of words used ...
I have read couple of submission guidelines and publisher notes that pays on the "word" unit for descriptive essays, articles and lists. (For ex, 2₹/word). Then there are different guidelines for p...
I'm identifying my target audience based on the experiment explained in the Snowflake Method book. The narrator describes it as follows: “Now I want you to imagine that you’ve published your no...
I have two versions of a pivotal scene in my novel (both already written). My SP is a rather impulsive young woman who is learning to be a bit less of a hothead. She saves the MC by literally taki...
I have found a company called Writer’s Relief. Their service is to write compelling submission and query letters to genre appropriate agents and publishers. They ask for a synopsis, fifteen pages ...
In my case, my character is literally a spectator. They're at a sporting event. There will be a major event which ramps up their plotline that occurs at this event, but I'm finding the event itself...
In a lot of books, at the beginning, the authors include quotes from poetry or songs that are relevant to the theme of their story or to their characters' situations. Obviously I would have to ask...
I am trying to create documentation for an application, and it's for end users who use keyboard (not mouse) and a screen reader. Some of our conventions require us to always use the full phrase ...
I am translating a religious book from language A to language B and have hired a student worker to help me. He is a native speaker of language A but does not speak language B at all. What I ask him...
