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'm writing a thesis in English (I'm not a native speaker) and I suddenly wondered: should I use 'for example' or 'e.g.'? should try to completely avoid both? There are no university specific r...
I have no degree and I cannot afford to have one, however, I would really love to get into technical writing because I love writing and I am interested in web and software development. Right now, I...
I am new to programming and am entirely self-taught. I have reached a point in my writing where a solid grasp of documentation standards would be greatly beneficial. My question is not how to add d...
I wrote an article for a university newspaper that summarizes incidents involving racism on campus. After edits, the sentence structure became uniformly long instead of varied, straightforward voca...
For example: An RLC circuit is composed of resistor, inductor, and capacitor elements. Or: An RLC circuit is composed of a resistor, an inductor, and a capacitor elements. Which one is...
In other words, is it strange/confusing to do this? For the next few seconds, I watched Aiko read the letter with her lips agape---lips that steadily curled up into a smile. A contagious one....
In a fiction novel. For example: Sanjay was watching World News. World News is a real television program so it's in italics. But what about: Sanjay was watching Dingdong News. Should Dingdong News...
In the past I never had the urge to write, except for poetry, which has always helped me to deal with my emotions. Lately, I have done a lot of world building. Rarely with the intention of writing ...
We use a BNF style to convey syntax for SQL statements. For a (fictitious) example: CREATE PARSER [schema.]function [WITH [LANGUAGE='language'] [, MODE='[FENCED | UNFENCED]' [, STUF...
How do I get correct information when looking something up for reference? I would go to google, yes, but how to get proper intel. I have this system where I get some general Idea for a "thing" ...
How would you cite a figure in MLA format if you are the author of it and the figure was not based off of any source?
My documentation team supports a massive software product, over 30 modules. These modules are individually licensed, so one customer might pay for all the modules where another might only pay to us...
I work (with a team) on a large documentation set for a complex software product. We publish HTML and have built-in search (plus, of course, there's Google). The doc set has a glossary, which pre...
Example of citation: Doe, Jane. “The House.” World Literature. Ed. John Doe. New York: Penguin, 1986. 25-30. Print. What I have in the text is the quote from the chapter in the textbook, the quot...
I use Latex for writing articles/papers/longer documents. Most of these documents are scientific in nature, and therefore it is often useful to add an index of the most important terms at the end o...
I am writing something similar to a review article about a scientific insight that connects and streamlines a number of seemingly different previous results. In the introduction, I give an example...
I am authoring a single author paper. Usually when referring to oneself in a paper, 'we' is used. In single author papers I found both 'we' and 'I' (e.g., 'here we/I report xyz'). Which one is sty...
I have been writing my first project that I intend for publication, and as with older projects, I have been bouncing ideas off of people here and there when I am in a creative rut. But how much hel...
For instance we are speaking of one time and then when we finish we speak of a moment that preceded, i.e.Ten hours before that. Or we are speaking about people in a facility and then we change to L...
My team uses MadCap Flare to produce a large body of documentation (thousands of topics). The source is "Flare HTML", HTML with some Flare additions (for variables, admonitions, snippets, and so o...
I want to write a short-story about 10 players in a post-apocalyptic zombies game show, split between teams, the last survivor wins. I already have the rules, the challenges and some characters. T...
We use doxygen to generate API (reference) documentation for our code. We have a small Java API and a large C++ API. The usual tool of choice for Java APIs is Javadoc, but doxygen can do both and...
In the vast majority of fantasy novels, the characters' names are somewhat original (Bilbo, Kvothe, Daenerys, Pug and so on). Some authors use special naming convention, like Robin Hobb who uses a ...
I cannot think of any sentence where the word "both" is not dead-weight. Can you help me understand when it is and is not appropriate to include "both" when proceeding a list of two. For example:...
At first glance, the question may be subjective, but let me provide a specific example: A story I'm self-editing takes place in a present-day small Virginia town. At present, the town is being ha...
Say you want to talk about a piece of command-line software, like make or bash or the cp command. These commands are all lower-case, and case-sensitive (i.e. won't work on the computer if you capit...
One of the rules of good writing is the show, don't tell rule. I want to create a realistic fantasy world, so I've thought about details like astronomy, geography and so on. For instance, this wor...
As a software developer, I often find myself writing my own technical documentation and user guides. How much detail should be put into this documentation? When is it too much detail? EDIT I'm...
I am writing a corporate guidelines manual. The manual itself is made in InDesign, and contains sample documents in it that show employees how to correctly write/format despatches. These document...
What are the usual typographical conventions to set off text from the UI in a user manual? For example, how should I style the text of the label on a button in: Press the Submit button. Or...
I have written some short stories that don't seem to fit into any category I can find. They feature God's relationship with various people, but they are not typical "Christian" writing. For examp...
It appears that the word citation and references are use interchangeably. Are they the same thing? https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecitationref.pdf
I am writing a formal research paper (for a competition called National History Day), using the Chicago citation style. I am using as a source this article. I would like to quote/reference the let...
Are the lyrics "signed, sealed, and delivered" copyrighted? I want to use these words as part of the title of a book to be published and need to know if I can do so.
This is a publishing question. The idea is: someone with a smartphone gets the card, scans the QR code printed on it, and downloads the PDF of your book off the web. I would have thought that a PDF...
In my thesis, I have added some links as footnotes. I have seen it in some published papers also. But my supervisor tells me to not to add footnotes to them, but add citations. The links I have ad...
I have the following sentence, NAME is a community that helps each other code better by rating each other's efforts and helps managers pair with other fellow developers I was suggested by ...
I want to make an announcement to my users at my website about a new feature launch. However, in its first phase, this new feature has limited access - it will be supporting only one city for now, ...
Somewhere along the way I picked up a bias against using questions in my writing. Recently I've been reading more about persuasive writing and ideas, and came across a suggestion that asking questi...
I'm looking at writing a book with code samples, hints, and other stuff, and was wondering what type of word processor would be recommended for writing a book that's 50+ pages (including code sampl...
How do I write the passing of a few years in a story? I have two separate character timelines and I want to show the characters aging throughout the story. Should I divide it up into parts? You can...
I've written short stories before (around 6,000 words), and I know what I have outlined is longer than a short story. But, I cannot decide if it is "novella length" or if it will break into "novel ...
What is the best way to incorporate a different language that uses another alphabet into a fiction manuscript? I am trying to use Russian in an English manuscript, but I don't know if I should use ...
When you have multiple sources for information like a quote, which source do you use in your book or essay. The one you may have gotten from an authors work about what a particular individual said ...
A company, M, buys components from company, S, to build into their product. Company S has technical documentation regarding safety and maintenance available in many languages and publicly available...
I'm the only technical writer in my company with 2 years of experience. I have been assigned with a task of creating a functional document for a web-based (FMCG) product which has been around a lon...
As a writer, it is difficult to help your readers hold two dissonant ideas in their heads. This can occur when the situation you are describing does not match well with the lived experience of your...
I have the idea to propose a world and some initial stories and offer other authors online to add their stories to this world. Could that work and yield interesting stuff? How should it organized t...
The protagonist in my story decides to research a topic. Naturally, I wanted her to encounter some obstacles first, so I arranged the starting chapters like this: First frustration > Second ...
Should a self published book on a biblical topic, use MLA or Chicago citation styles? It'll be a persuasive writing on a biblical subject. I want to persuade the reader to my point of view but I k...
