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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When writing a dialogue for characters, say two or more who are speaking back and forth do you have to put who is speaking on every time you switch characters? Is it needed to put their name befo...
The question is pretty much what the title is. I do know that all intellectual property is protected by copyright law from the moment of it's creation. I have backed up my work with several methods...
I'm looking for an (online) tool to convert a long list of DOI's (1000+) into citation information. There are several tools that let you enter one DOI at a time, such as doi2bib or Crossref but tho...
In technical writing, I have a tic of writing in pairs. Some examples from a recent piece: "When you speak, be sure to be clear and concise." "Face to face conversation is personal and private." ...
My boss cites email to him as "Private communication". I want to cite email from a subject matter expert to a number of individuals (of which I was not one in the original message). It is not pri...
I'm writing a guide to give step-by-step instructions to complete some tasks on the computer. At some points, I need to indicate pressing keys on the keyboard; how may I format the letter/symbol to...
I have asked a question like this before in Workplace, but this time is only about diagrams specifically, and on formal work generally. Some answers in there say that I can use the Venn diagram if ...
When writing a technical report, is it necessary to explain what is written in upcoming chapters? For example in my introduction chapter, I may have a sub-chapter called "Forthcoming chapters" whi...
I am one of several authors on a fairly new shared blog. The blog has a mix of serialized and one-shot posts. Because it's a new blog (2.5 months, ~30 posts so far), there is quite a variety of p...
My daughter and I thought it was a good idea to write a book about our experiences throughout her casting for a movie that she did. Her view on the journey and My view as her mother. Not sure how t...
In the essay that I'm writing, I claim that women are more likely to be victims of abduction than are men. As evidence, I cite a study on child abduction (the NISMART, if you must know) stating tha...
I just wrote last week about Sleeping Beauty but a different version of it. (I changed the characters, and the conflict, and mostly everything except the fact that one of the main characters is cur...
I'm looking to buy some software for technical document authoring with DITA. The tech writing group will have at least 5-10 users, writing 100-pages long documents for several products in various l...
I would like to start a novel, but it would include Fantasy species such as Dwarves and Elves, etc. I got this idea after reading several of Tolkien's novels. If I write this novel it would have co...
I just want to purchase ~200 copies of my anthology containing short stories and sell them to family and friends by myself in order to donate to charity. I don't need an agent. I can format by myse...
As the title question asks: Should embedded figures/images be placed before or after they are referred to in text? Which is more appropriate? Or does it depend on the setting/context?
I have a question regarding comma splices. I'm trying to learn more about comma splices and how to remove them from some work I am doing. I understand the basics regarding them but I have a questio...
I'm desperately trying to get out of my dead end Federal job. I have a BA in English and a love of a lot of different topics, including several science fields. I would have Majored in science if I ...
My situation is such that I will be looking for a new job next week as this contract ends. For a tech writer, it is good to have DITA on the ole' resume. So, I just wanted to know if anyone has a s...
I have seen most personal blogs where the blog author's writing style is undisciplined and mostly inspiration-driven; that is, the author doesn't care too much for grammar and usually writes in a p...
Consider a piece writing that makes three points, all prefaced by some type of heading: Multiple paragraphs of introduction Heading 1 Multiple paragraphs explaining Argument 1 Headi...
I have a non-fiction book that I want to create an index for. Is there any standard for what items should be included in an index? Some things are obvious like names and proper nouns. But, is ther...
I'm not even sure if I need to since I often see statistics on website and blog posts without a source. Do I need to? And how should I do it? From what I've seen when the source is mentioned, peop...
I'm working on a novel which is set in the late 1920s, and the protagonist is a minor Lord in England. I wrote the first four chapters and handed it to an American friend, whose criticism largely c...
I'm finishing up a 350 page book that I will self publish. I plan on printing my book at a local printing store but they charge $6 to bind each book. I'm paying my tuition with the profit of this b...
My team uses MadCap Flare for documentation and we have an editor on the team. When a writer is ready, we assemble a review package in Flare and send it to the editor, and she makes changes and se...
There are some books published without a back-of-book index, which I feel is a dreadful shame. As part of my research I decided to create an index of one such book. Doing so is legal for my own use...
I'm about to publish the English translation of my novel, originally written in Spanish. In the original Spanish edition I thank my "experimental readers", and especially someone who did a thorough...
Lately I've noticed some news articles using (usually) a single sentence per paragraph. Some examples: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29341850 http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/614773...
In many companies I've seen it that more than 1 person are writing at the same documentation (be it user manual or technical documentation) for a computer application. What I have seen in usage wa...
Programmers can write comments in code that can be automatically turned into API documentation (like Javadoc). All I have to do is add some comments explaining what a class or method does and what...
I've written a crime novel, which is on its final draft before seeking publication now. The novel is set in my hometown. A major "set piece" scene is set in a real location, a business, which I wo...
In the history of the world I am building, there is a big time spam, divided by some important events that changed the course of human history many times. Brief: At first, we have these two sh...
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...
We are planning to create a user guide for internal use only. It's 150-page document in Word for a self-developed SW tool. The user guide will require constant update. No translation is needed. We ...
Which one should be used for a story written in the past tense? Example: But just as I was about to consider that possibility, I spotted something: a blood-stained feather. It was caught betw...
I have a sentence in my literature review that goes something like this: ... has only been thoroughly evaluated by a relatively small number of experts in the xx literature (author1992; author1994...
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...
Just that: What do you need version control for? I've never had the feeling I needed to undo any changes in my (fiction or academic) writing. So what is version control good for? How do you write ...
A whole lot of publishing houses look at works posted on blogs as "previously published". Now, let us say I put something on my blog and it is around for some months (or an year or two). One (not-s...
I will be creating a blog article that talks about Illuminati in our local country. I will be talking about the "organization's" role in making specific artists popular (for a duration) and in retu...
I often tend to treat my blog as my diary and thereby end up having a mix up personal and general blogs on my site. I understand that it does not attract readers - a mixed bag of one liner and arti...
While writing stories how do I describe the action of common hand gestures, for instance the "come on" signal. Is there any reference? I found a list of hand gestures in wikipedia but obviously i...
I am currently working on my first novel so forgive me for making what is probably considered the mistake of a 'novice'. My novel is set in the present, however my antagonist has a history dating b...
I'm currently in the process of writing a small localised book on arranging funerals yourself (D.I.Y funerals). During the process of collating information, I have made phone calls to local funeral...
The reference documentation for an application programming interface (API) is, in modern systems, usually generated from the code itself automatically. For example, for Java interfaces a typical t...
In technical documentation, sometimes the tool's automatic hyphenation makes a bad break in the middle of a term, like the name of an environment variable or function. In these cases I would rathe...
Not long ago I read a novel set in the near future (mid-21st century). My suspension of disbelief was totally fine with time travel, an implanted "universal translator" of sorts, major medical adv...
I want to start a webcomic. For this, I expect I'll be doing a lot of writing. I once had someone draw a webcomic based on my writing and it was a nonsensical mess. The art was good, but nobody kne...
