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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The bulk of my writing consists of technical papers, reports, notes, and memos. Because of the mathematical nature of my work I spend a lot of time writing definitions, and it is very important tha...
I finished the first draft of a novel I'm writing. Right now, it has 17000 words. I've heard that novels these days range from 60,000 to 150,000 words, so I'm a little bit worried (I'm hoping to ha...
I have been writing high school English paper on a novel in MLA format. Is there any rule about using past participle or past imperfect? Throughout the essay there have been many places that can ...
I want to email the author to get the complete paper. He's published a version with proof sketches, but I need the whole proofs. My draft: Subject : Paper Request Dr. ..... I've read your paper ...
I've had a few friends review my unpublished manuscript, and they were in my target market and quite knowledgeable in English. What are some good ways to get some more reviews, of a decent level in...
I'm a tech genre author, and have already published one book on Android development. However, this book was focused more on the developer of the apps, than the user. Now I'm working on my second b...
I found some examples of good and poor example of executive summaries here. Everything seems fine but in one of them, they included this sentence - "All calculations can be found in the appendi...
There are plenty of rhyming dictionaries; is there such a thing as a metrical dictionary? Sometimes in fixed-form poetry, I need a word to fit a specific position in a line, and it would be really ...
I am in one of the newsletter teams of my company. Last week, I had mailed the Vice-President of our company to write an article for our newsletter, to which he replied in affirmative and mailed me...
Most of my writing experience has been with first person, nonfiction stories. Now I want to try some fiction. I'm working in third person, but I'm a little bit confused about how to pull something ...
I always see the em dash (—) in fiction writing. Here are some example from Haruki Murakami's After Dark: Komugi comes in and takes something from one of the cartons piled against the wall—a...
I am wondering if it is a good idea to include a sense of dementia in my writing. For example, it's a personal narrative where the character is traumatized for a paragraph. I feel like a good way t...
Does using unexplained spiritual elements (soul, "spiritual"/non-physical beings, afterlife, God, etc.) in a story with a futuristic setting make it science fantasy rather than science fiction?
I'm at the outline stage of my novel writing. It is pretty straightforward to think of an action-adventure novel's victory as attained by physical attributes and/or courage. I'm looking for alter...
I am writing a non-fiction book based on recorded interviews with several people. I have recorded verbal consent to be interviewed for the book from each person. One of the interviewees has since ...
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 ...
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...
I am in the process of answering the question please indicate any leadership roles you have held for a particular job application but still feel as if my replies lack a certain crispness and flow. ...
How do you welcome a business audience to your presentation? I've thought of: Hello, my name is [prename] [surname] and I am going to talk about [...] but it sounds rather like a school present...
I am a PhD candidate and I am having difficulty in communicating effectively in writing. Specifically, this post is a piece of text submitted for critique and, in addition, explains what I am tryin...
I'm Brazilian and I'm writing a book in portuguese. However the story takes place first in Europe, i.e. Italy, Portugal, and London. Of course this requires of me some research about the culture of...
Example: The whole thing sounded a bit strange. How had she gotten my number? I wondered. I didn't know anyone called Maria. The whole thing sounded a bit strange. How had she gotten my...
As a novice writer of fourteen, I've tried a few attempts at science fiction (military science fiction, to be specific), and of course my writing's got HUGE mistakes and shortcomings. But the most ...
When writing academic text, you're often in the position of having to write introductory or explanatory material for your audience. Usually you write this kind of material after you've explored the...
I have written and self published the book 'babymoves' in 2002. It is now in its third edition. I sell it through my website. I have been approached by a Japanese woman, wanting to translate the bo...
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...
Example: "I'm not saying you don't know what you are talking about," he said, then looked at her and shrugged his shoulders. "But I don't know what you are talking about." "I'm not say...
I've just watched one part of Brandon Sanderson's lecture on writing, the section entitled Gardeners & Architects and I realised I'm a Gardener, almost exclusively. This often ends up with me w...
I am writing a tutorial on how to use a specific web application and I don't know which verbs to use. Shall I use "click" for buttons? But what if the user doesn't use a mouse? Contrary to "normal"...
Whenever I see a movie critic praise Ridley Scott's Prometheus, they seem to be drooling over all the mythological references, although most don't necessarily complement gaps in the story or enrich...
I'm writing a novel that will have 9 chapters. Most of the chapters have the same structure: The main character goes down a hole she found in her room. She finds herself in a strange part of the...
I'm looking for advice on writing a synopsis for my novel. I've found quite a few examples online, but none for multiple POVs and time periods. My novel is written from the point of view of three m...
Is there any reference for comparing publishers (or at least major ones)? Writers choose a publisher based on fame or by chance, but is there any system for rank of publishers? Or providing statist...
I read a quote a long time ago, but did not know the origin. I want to use it in a paper I am writing, so I tried researching to find out who is the source of the quote. The quote is "We are the ...
Some scripts I read specify the exact camera angle of every shot-- where the camera starts, what we see, how it will move during the scene. And some scripts are a little less specific. Is this on...
Whenever I watch 'Smallville', I wonder how the writers take us back and forth the timeline without getting into a conflicting situation. Another example would be 'Back to the Future' trilogy. Al...
Recently, I wrote a short story that contains a flashback in the middle that was used to explain a major plot point in the story. Does a significant scene set as a flashback break up the flow of a ...
I'm already quite good at writing and putting together words and sentences. However, I would like to improve myself to the level that I can write a nice entertaining novel or several short stories ...
I have never kept a diary, and some time back I thought it would be fun to work on some sort of autobiography to note down any memorable events etc. I am not famous, and even if completed the 'audi...
I am writing (and self publishing) a non-fiction travelogue about a cross country roadtrip. I have already obtained permission from the person I traveled with, and there are no other main character...
I'm looking for an authoritative convention for attributing a book to both an author and editor. It is necessary in this instance to have the editor's name on the cover as well as the author's. N...
what are the steps to such thing, i want to write an episode to beavis and butthead and send it to MTV ,i don't live in the USA,i don't know if that a problem , please provide me with all the detai...
I am writing a (commercial) book about cinema and reviews of movies. My question is about the pictures to illustrate the text. For example I suppose that I can't use the promotional poster of a mo...
I'm currently writing a thesis. Just the introduction is 25 pages/8000 words. The whole document will probably be 70 pages or so. With a document this large, and on such a complex topic, it can be ...
I'm in the process of translating a book (scientific publication) for private use. If I ever decide to publish it: what is the procedure? Who is the right person to ask for publishing rights and tr...
For writing diary content every day, which English tense is appropriate to use? Things have all happened already. I usually write late at night (end of the day) or the next day. Should I use si...
I always wondered if going off-topic in a dialogue is a bad or a normal thing. For example, let's say I'm writing a novel where the main theme is love and loss. Is it bad if the characters start t...
Looking for some help on how to reference chapters in a book inside of a booking I'm helping with. Should I be capitalizing Chapters 3 and 4 and would referring to chapters simply by capitalized t...
I've written a couple of short stories. I'm really satisfied with some of them, and I would like to turn them into full-length novels. They were meant to be short stories from the beginning, but I ...
When writing a letter there is often meta information about the correspondence before the actual content of the letter. For example, in bold below:- Address,Town,City,Postcode 23rd July 20...
