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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I am writing my thesis and using notes from different lectures on the topic as a source of sources. These notes cite other papers and present briefly the ideas, and I do use the lecture notes to fi...
I'm working on a heist scene where five thieves are supposed to enter a corporate building and steal a few documents. It's supposed to be a major scene so it won't be short. I need the readers to v...
For instance. I've never really paid attention to white vans, but when the DC sniper was at large and they stated that he's probably shooting from a white van, white vans seemed to appear out of no...
I am a few thousand words into my newest draft and starting to question if I picked the right beginning. As usual, when I get back into the habit of writing regularly, I have also gotten back into ...
I'm thinking of self publishing. Now what all the blogs tell me I have to do is hire a professional editor, who will see any plot / character holes, other story problems etc. (For the moment, I'm n...
In the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore seems to represent ultimate wisdom and authority. Harry (and the readers with him) hold him in awe; many times throughout the series Harry willingly accepts a...
The following is a standalone passage from a collection meant to deal with topics of psychology, philosophy and self-help. The question is: Is the quirky style helpful in driving home the point, o...
I'm writing a short film that has the vast majority scenes set in a pub, with the main male character about to approach a woman, and he imagines/projects some of the possibilities of this - it goes...
I just finished "The House of the Seven Gables" by Hawthorne. I was struck by how often he switched tenses. Mostly the narration was in past tense, but then he would switch to present or even fut...
I am new to this forum and would like to share one of my short novel here. I would love to hear any comments and thoughts (e.g., how the story flows, any better way to describe the atmosphere? and ...
Sometimes you can write a lot without saying anything, sometimes you can say a lot but get little through the reader. In technical writing the later is very typical (at least for me), one can ten...
A Japanese company has offered me a gig helping translate an Android1 business application + documentation into English. Their staff will do a rough translation, and I will polish it into something...
I'm writing sort of a space-opera and I was wondering what would the best way to explain everything about the world to my readers. The story is kind of a political intrigue, and it would be very ea...
So I feel I'm a pretty good programmer in my area of expertise. Whats the process for writing a book about my niche and getting it published?
Possible Duplicate: Where to publish poems I used to write poems and stories. They were published in local newspapers many times, but I did not get any benefit besides this limited publi...
Eight of my books are available on Google Books as 100% online, downloadable, but no Creative Commons licensing. Now I am starting to see them show up in bookstores, in versions I didn't have print...
I write a ton of magazine articles online. My editor tells me you do not need a works cited as you do in academic work. I am wondering what kind of citing you do need and what I should be doing for...
I am writing a user manual for an IT system. And inside the user manual I have sentences such as: Users can delete Servers that do not have Customers assigned to them. Is the use of present...
I need to revise a screenplay in Final Draft, and I'm finding that the revision features in the program are poor. Are there any ways to introduce revision features in to Final Draft, similar to Tra...
I find it easier to write many things with parentheses, but I don't know if this is considered good practice. I would expect some might say that parentheses are indicative of excessive digression a...
I'm writing a short story for an assignment at school - but I'm having trouble keep it short. I have a habit to go off on a tangent quite a bit, and this ends up making it a lot longer than it shou...
Having encountered errors in technical documentation that almost certainly came from incomplete editing after copying from earlier documentation, I am curious about what techniques can be used to a...
I believe I understand this and I'm looking for confirmation. Examples: It has become a tugging match with the Weird Man shouting, "I'll take you to a taxi... I'll take you." Ahead, a group is...
When writing in the first person, what is a good way to convey that the viewpoint character is lying, without saying so explicitly? My idea is this: "I am writing this as a record of what's be...
English isn't my native tongue, but I've been writing novels in English for a while. Most of the time, I can be aware of what's grammatically correct and what's not. But making sure that a sentence...
Let's say I had a character which was looking at a book shelf and I wanted to mention a particular book that they were looking at, let's say it's Lord of the Rings, should I put the title in quotes...
I know that Australian English has many spellings in common with British English, but (as with Canadian English) the two are not identical. Are there standard, authoritative dictionaries for Austra...
I'm in the process of defining the characters for a novel. It is a crime fiction, with a really strong focus on the characters. I hope to construct really rich, complex and clearly defined characte...
I am poet and a blogger, and was writing a poem today for my blog. It went something like: So, are you missing me? Missing me so much that you crave, crave to meet me right now... Does anybody k...
In my essay (specifically a recount essay of a moment in the past), my objective is to end with the discussion of Death as a being (because my recounted moment will be related to death). I'd like t...
Possible Duplicate: Internet communities where I can read/rate/review short fiction, and post my own? I am a user of Cowbird already, and I love it, but I want to branch out, and go to o...
What is the name of the structure of a novel that is not in chronological order but moves between characters (viewing the same or different topic)?
Sometimes I can't decide whether to use a semicolon or a em dash. Usually, I start with semicolons and, once I notice there are too many of them, I start replacing a few with em dashes (as I read s...
I'm a member of some SE sites, like SO and CSTheory. In those sites I'm an active member, I'm reading Q&A and also answering some questions or asking questions, but I think my writing is poor....
My question is related to best practices of making screenshots for end-user documentation. Particularly, is there universal information for filling in forms in the software and after that making sc...
I am writing a novel whose plot that I just learned is going to be made into a movie---how can I protect myself if similar plot points are used so that I don't get sued and vice versa?
I am in the final stages of writing a book and currently I am preparing the index. Are there any rules whether index entries should be listed in singular or plural? Currently I have Markov chains...
When I sit down and put words on paper or type into my computer, that aspect of creating a text (like a novel or software manual) is called "writing": I store the content of my text in letters. Bu...
Is it really necessary to place the appendices in a book in the order in which they are referred to, or is it possible to have a "logical" order, i.e. place them in an order which would be chosen w...
Is there any widely accepted step by step method for writing a creative article in a professional manner. I want to improve my English writing skills in relation to creative article writing. I rea...
If I publish an eBook, distribute it and later I want to edit or add to the information, is there is a way to push those updates to the already distributed copies of the eBook?
For my book I'm planning to self-pub, I aim to hire a copyeditor / proofreader at some point. The question is this: Should I do any proofreading myself, other than using a spell checker? Currently...
I plan to self publish a book (non fiction). Currently I have 150.000 characters, but when it's done I will end up with around 250.000. I am not a native english speaker but write the book in engli...
I am working on a scene (one of many) and I am having trouble with voice (in all of them). I find first person handy in some situations and third in others. Below are two excerpts from the same s...
For example, if you have a guy who is an Indian (from India), and you say something like, Sukant answered in his Northern Bhojpuri accent, "Yes. It is indeed true. Many people come into my ...
If two authors collaborate, and each of them already has an agent - then who handles the collaborative work? Do the authors decide to be jointly represented under one of their two agents? If that'...
I'm not sure if this is right for this part of Stackexchange, but since there is no psychology section, here we go: I'm currently writing the same short story several times with the intention of c...
My name is Richard Devine and I am currently working on a collaboration with Stephen King, (obviously NOT the original author himself). We currently act under the pseudo name 'KD Novels' (King/Devi...
I'm writing an essay (MLA style) for class and I am quoting a whole sentence within my sentence. For example: They published a “manifesto” proclaiming that “[a]ll are welcome to walk through our ...
