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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After a little googling I found this: The Complete Book of Scriptwriting What are other good examples?
If you're writing a fantasy novel, would it be best to include a map of the geography that the story takes place in at the beginning of the book? I've seen quite a lot of fantasy books (Redwall s...
Some stories tell well from beginning to end, all in a neat little line...and some don't. When can a story be improved by using a different order in the telling? Off the top of my head, I'd say...
I'm on a bit of a Myers-Briggs spree at the moment (which is dangerous, because it is so easy to read way more into it than you are supposed to). For those of you who are not familiar with it, it ...
An opinion exists that overusing of the passive voice can make writing harder for reading and understanding. Is it true for all kinds of writing? How to follow this advice without overemphasizing ...
I have always had a problem with travel in my stories. Since I'm writing an epic fantasy novel, travel is a big theme as characters often have to move from where they are to where the plot dictate...
It's been about five years since I last submitted any of my work for publication, and my memory of what I was taught then to put in my cover letter is getting rusty. What kind of information sho...
The main character of a YA story I am working on is fast becoming a polymath, i.e. someone with a broad base of skills and interests across unrelated areas of endeavor. I really like how this char...
I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett, and he doesn't use chapters (mostly). Are there any other authors who tend to not use traditional chapters or chapters at all in novels?
I'm writing feature articles and trying to adhere to AP style, but I'm not sure how to attribute a source. I'm familiar with academic citation (APA, MLA), but have never done this in journalism. W...
I haven't been able to find an answer to this question for a while now. What is the proper way to write time in a manuscript? I'm referring mostly to A.M. and P.M. Should it be written in caps? Wit...
Suppose you have a character who has a rank in a foreign military - say, Feldwebel Hans. That's the equivalent of a Sergeant. On one hand, having people call him "Herr Feldwebel" gives some flavor...
Occasionally I write sentences containing subparts with extra information. I never know how to block off this information from the rest of the sentence. Three ways I have seen are dashes, commas, a...
How do you defend the integrity of your work while maintaining a cooperative and friendly rapport? Specifically, how can one work with an editor who is perhaps a bit overzealous?
I've been doing websites for 16 years, but am new to writing a blog. Websites pages change all the time, but it seems to me that blog posts are relatively static once they've been posted. If I wan...
Although the use of "had had" is grammatically correct, it doesn't read well and seems awkward to me. Take for example the following sentence: I had had enough of this nonsense and was ready t...
All. The biggest area I am working right now is to improve my written communications skills. It’s a tough skill to learn but a good one to have, since most of what we do is exchange email with our ...
I am writing a book in which one of my main characters is a devout Catholic. His struggles with reconciling his religion and his experiences in life are crucial to his character and I'd like to por...
Another stack site I use is currently having an election and I am considering nominating. There are two parts to the nomination process; the nomination itself and the questionnaire to candidates. T...
Often while writing a software requirement/change-request documentation, I need to include the quoted requirements descriptively, the impacted modules, the changes provided both in UI and in logic....
I'm the adviser of a school newspaper that publishes exclusively online now. We have a page dedicated to revisiting the archives of our paper (60 years worth!). I cannot piece together how to prope...
I'm getting ready to start submitting a book I've written. I copyrighted an earlier draft of it a few years ago (as in submitted it for official registered copyright). The final draft has not cha...
When you write in a modern day setting, you research the culture, climate, location and history of that setting. You can do the same for historical fiction or low-fantasy settings based on real pla...
My story (novella?) starts in media res, in the middle of the conflict that will set the rest of the story in motion. Currently I am "scene-cutting" between that event and some earlier events that...
I'm a self-taught programmer which means I started writing software by sitting down at an IDE and hammering out some code. When my decisions ultimately coded me into a corner I would refactor and r...
I currently spend a good deal of time over at Code Review and I would love to improve the quality of the reviews I write. Can you give me any insight into the structure or approach you use when wri...
I am a long time Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder. My games run in a custom world of my own making. However, I utilise a lot of the traditional lore and races of D&D. I'm ...
I'm not well versed in technical writing. I'm probably not going to be in a position to give anyone feedback for some time, but I would like to know how to approach it when I get there. I would als...
I sometimes post photos on my blog, like when I'm blogging about food. I've been shrinking the huge pictures my phone takes down to a size that fits more reasonably in a browser window -- my brows...
Two other friends and I have been writing a fan fiction and we basically write a chapter each one after another every week. Now that we're nearing the end of the project, we've noticed that the wr...
If you use an old expression like "by a many", do you need to make it consistent and use old expressions throughout the poem, or is it ok to just use it in one verse or sentence? “The spring is...
The title says it all: what is special in Application Programming Interface documentation compared to general technical writing? What aspects should I take care of?
There are occasions where you basically just start a chapter with a short descriptive passage and go straight to dialogues, so in those situations I am not sure how to deal with acronyms in dialogu...
I'm considering a pen name to use, and I wanted to see if its firstlast.com domain is available, but it wasn't. So, I thought I could change the domain to something like firstlastwrites.com, author...
I have been intending to create a book for toddlers with basic scientific notions in it. Most books for this target readership that I have seen present whatever content in the form of a story, quit...
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...
Our documentation set includes some diagrams where text is integral and can't be handled in callouts, like flowcharts and entity relationship diagrams. Our documentation is translated, so these di...
I have been hired as a Technical Writer at a firm who needed multiple types of writers: A few people were hired to write content for the average website reader interested in our product, such as a...
I'm using an unknown primary source quote in my document. Harvey references it in this book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=a2hnAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y However does not cite it. How do I cit...
I'm a big fan of ongoing stories and longer series. But one thing I've noticed about my writing (and a lot of the works I read/watch) is that as a story goes on, the tone gets progressively darker...
For a long time I've been searching for some reference on how to write a scientific journal but failed to find one. I specifically want to write a scientific journal to be used as my personal jou...
If I'm planning on self-publishing an anthology of unpublished short stories that I wrote, do I also need to copyright each story, or will the entire anthology's copyright suffice for each story?
I have a question on linkers and connectors. I'm from Spain, so I learnt English at school and all my English teachers have told me throughout secondary school that we always have to use linkers t...
How can I properly cite an Oracle's documentation of the usage of certain APIs? For instance HashMap - Oracle Documentation I need to cite/reference this in my research paper, what is the best w...
I recently saw a contest for writing flash fiction - the contest rules were that it had to be under 100 words long. I thought "Hey, that's cool! I'll give it a shot." So I sat down, and tried to s...
I have a highly flexible software product consisting of a series of loosely coupled microservices. Each component is effective at a single job, but may be dependent on inputs from other services. I...
In technical translation (e.g. of manuals), the quality of the source text often is not very high. This concerns not only the language used, but also the structure of the whole document. Should te...
I am writing a non-fiction, somewhat historic, book and I want to dedicate it to a person who did pioneer work on Education in Science in Brazil. She has passed away recently and was professionall...
In a technical tutorial it is helpful for a user to be able to check their progress often. Veryfing that the steps have produced a result is good because the user: has a feeling of progress can c...
I'm from Ireland, most of my stories take place in Ireland, and many of my characters will speak with Irish accents and/or dialects to varying degrees. For the most part I think this is OK, and can...
