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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Throughout Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry is certain that Snape is serving Voldemort, and bulling Quirrell into helping him. At the climax, we learn that Snape is protecting Harry,...
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...
I was blogging about opening lines the other day, and looking for examples. I came across the opening to American Gods, and realized that it's neither flashy nor something that will grab the reader...
I am interested in writing a book on a particular class of natural products. It would discuss the products' isolation and biological functions - these are the two chapters that I can fit into the b...
Currently, I am writing papers with rather short sentences: About half of them contain around 20 words, about 10% to 20% even less. I am doing this for three reasons: I find short sentences easi...
Hopefully this meets the FAQ under the 'Non-fiction, technical' section. I work as a Graphic Designer, but I want to apply for a job as an Advertising Account Manager. While my title at my curren...
I have a project I have been working on for many years. It is quite personal and is intended for a small audience. In the story, the protagonist is trying to find/help another character, who for ...
I am trying to write a sentence that tells the reader that the works displayed that they are about to see will bring them back and forth between the real and virtual realms, in a figurative manner....
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've recently followed the advice of our very own Jeff Atwood and started a blog site in order to become a better writer and communicator. My goal is to improve my skill at technical writing and b...
I've written several essays and am still working on some that I would like to eventually get published. The issues I cover are on a wide range of topics ranging from Scientology to Piracy to Demo...
I have a son in kindergarten who is interested in reading. He also loves the stores that I tell him each night. These are usually just made up on the spot and are pretty silly. If I wanted to writ...
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...
I want to write some reference books containing details about the fictional universe of some popular franchises, such as Tintin, or Star Trek. This would contain short plot summaries (1-paragraph i...
I have a horrific habit I'm finding it very difficult to break. A disturbingly large portion of my sentences consist of the same structure-- two parts separated by "and." I don't know how to break ...
I'm writing a novel, and it's written in close third person perspective, very much sitting on the shoulder of one main character and privy to their thoughts. There is another very important charact...
The title says it all. I'm talking about a feature-length film here, although I'm sure the techniques are universal.
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...
I've looked at some of the largest outsourcing sites. These have huge amounts of software developers, and huge amounts of casual writers. I'm having enormous difficulty finding authors that would...
I planning to write about the convergence of our real world and the computer reality world. My plan to develop on this idea is to describe this convergence as a "merger" between our real world and ...
I have the PC Study Bible, which is a collection of resources (Bible versions, commentaries, &c.) bundled together and accessed via a special software program. How do I cite one of the resource...
I am working on a bio for a development conference I am presenting at. My writing style causes my Flesch Reading Ease score to trend high. While I like what I have below I'd like to simplify it a b...
I go to a CEGEP, which is basically pre-university in Montreal. In my Introduction to English class, I had a teacher who allowed us to go around the typical essay writing conventions. Conventions l...
I'm trying to collect feedback from my colleagues and the deadline is on 10-April-2012, 2.00pm. So in my mail I write: Please email your feedback to me before 2.00pm, 10-April-2012(Tuesday). ...
Disclaimer: I'm not an native English speaker Here is the first part of a short novel I'm writing. For the description I wanted the reader to have an idea of the place first and then let him know...
I understand there's a certain element of stylistic freedom in using quotes, double quotes, or neither. But what are the specific cases when single quotes are generally recommended?
This is the first short story where I'm using actual names for the characters. Here is a sample: "Sorry for the question," Jun said. "But why don' you have friends?" Ling glanced at him, t...
I'm writing a documentation for an eGovernment project, so the document I'm writing is a scientific document. It contains some big ideas, each having some subideas, with each subidea having a numbe...
In my story THE GOSPEL OF THE RETURN OF A CHRIST THAT WANTS ANSWERS I wanted to evoke a sense of the middle ages in a modern book. So I utilized a technique where whenever I referred to a character...
I am a blogger and sometimes I find articles with similar content or an idea coincidentally similar as mine which is not published at the time of reading that similar article but which I have writt...
I've written myself into a sci-fi cliche which I have never seen done well: two characters meet in virtual reality. The gist of my scene is one character has been in a pseudocoma, more aware of he...
I've had a few different ideas for an ending that I've narrowed down to two. They both fit the tone and they both fit the story. But they are also completely different. How do I pick? For example,...
Over my years on StackExchange I've come to view answering SE questions as its own, highly specialized writing subgenre, with its own demands, and its own ideal format. By trial and error, and obs...
I am trying to expand the depth of my writing beyond simple storytelling. Although my previous novel was an action/adventure, I realized it has a deeper point than entertainment. Dean Koontz offers...
THE ISSUE There must be a catch-phrase or soundbite to describe this scenario, but so far, I've been unsuccessful locating that term, and my efforts to answer this question have been flat as well....
Edit: Perhaps a list of words prone to mis-use would serve the need, here. Is anyone aware of a resource that lists words with emotional baggage? Example: I use the expression 'enormity of...
I decided a few chapters into a book I'm writing that I dislike present tense, and that I would need to go back and make all instances of present tense past tense to maintain consistency. However, ...
I introduced a young person (called Raven) who the main character was friends with in my story; Raven is an excellent student who the main character is also teaching music to. The story is the resu...
A book that I'm currently writing called Surge features an enemy faction called the Degenerates that are heavily inspired by the Scythians (Indo-Iranian horse nomads that ruled the Eurasian Steppe ...
I work on developer documentation at a tech startup. As of now, we implement the following feedback mechanisms: We have a thumbs-up/down feedback system on each page of the docs site. If a user c...
As technology advances and workflows are streamlined, some have turned to automated tools such as Doxygen, Sphinx, Swagger, etc. in order to generate technical documentation automatically. What ar...
This is something I've pondered before. I asked about one gesture on yahoo answers long ago. All I got was a guy saying that even he didn't know the term for it (it was the gesture where someone ho...
In my story, there's this big bad, who needs to be destroyed. That is the main goal for about the last third of the video game. So the group of heroes manages to destroy him! ... but I don't want t...
I'm looking for a dialog tag for when someone is in awe and saying something along the lines of "oooooo!" or "wooooooow!" "Oooooooo!" they ______ed. Does it exist? If so, what is it?
It seems like many manuals and technical documents prefer passive voice over active voice. Is this true, or is it just my perception? If so, why?
Quickly communicating data lineage to other stakeholders in our organization has become increasingly difficult as we scale. What are effective strategies to address this and keep it maintained? A...
We have a tool that we cannot replace that does not support single sourcing. As a result, with instructions that involve the same node, we either repeat the same dozen steps over and over, or refer...
In our documentation, we write binary numbers like this: 1010 But we write hexadecimal numbers like this: 0xABAB Now, according to the GCC compiler conventions: Numbers are normally written in...
I want to write a fantasy novel with a female protagonist, and I want to familiarize myself with reader expectations. Is there still a tradition of (medieval-type) fantasy by and for women, and wha...
It's well known that live presenters are often advised to add a dose of humour in order to engage the audience better. However, I very rarely see humour in written technical documentation; this de...
