Search
Let me suggest that lightheartedness is not a character trait but a response to circumstance. Let me suggest that a lighthearted character is one who expects to get the things they desire, and that...
The standard publishing route remains traditional print publishing. But the thing you have to realize is that publishing is not about printing, it is about marketing and distribution. It is about t...
You are absolutely right that we only want to see the plan once. Either we follow the planning in detail or we follow the execution in detail. We do not need to read it twice. Unless, of course, it...
As already said, instructions are about helping the reader do the steps in the right order without missing any of them. This, of course, can take different forms in different contexts. Recipes is o...
I think it is important to note that while there is often one particular moment where the choice is faced and made -- what James Scott Bell calls "the mirror moment", the choice may not necessarily...
The most obvious approach, depending one where the help is to be displayed, is to use italics for optional items. That is a well established convention in command-line documentation. ARRAY[data-typ...
Official ISO programming standards that describe programming language syntax etc often use opt to mark an argument as optional (with "OPT" in italics). So I would propose to write ARRAY[data-typ...
I haven't read the other answers, but still wanted to weigh in with what I think might be going on, because I know how frustrating it is to have an idea you can't seem to fulfill. I'll break this a...
Monica covers the main points excellently. Beyond that, if there is one specific thing I would suggest that you do to improve and remain relevant as a technical writer, it is learning to code. Thi...
There's a nice technique for this: have the character notice something is off, then either have them dismiss it with an unconvincing explanation, or distract them. This can be combined very well wi...
I would make A grow with the times. If he can see premonitions of his own future, and knows they can be changed, he can see that his freak outs are going to leave him without friends in the near fu...
One way to make the leaving of that secondary antagonist satisfying could be if it gives a problem for the protagonist. Now how could an antagonist leaving be a problem? Well, it is a problem if th...
If you are afraid of being criticized, don't be a writer. You are not writing a documentary. Your responsibility is not to correctly diagnose your characters. Your responsibility is to focus your...
I struggle with this on an ongoing basis, though less than in the past. First of all, I notice that experienced authors using just a couple descriptors around the time of character introduction (...
One element of curating is which answer got accepted. It relates to what Amadeus says about first answer getting all the votes: the OP presumably sees all answers, and picks the one that helped mos...
Both versions are correct and as long as you keep it as short as necessary to distinguish both authors it's fine. For example take a look at some similar examples from "What’s in a Name? Authors Wi...
I have no clue what he meant by designed. But I agree with him that you have not designed the documentation. Why? Because you have not created a list of user tasks. Documentation is a response t...
It is good to have specific details that mean something to the viewpoint character. She listened to the music of LILLAHI birds, and it made her calm, perhaps because lillahi birds used to sing o...
I'm here -- apparently none of my rep came with me, although I claimed my questions?
In particular, it absolutely should not make people think "disgruntled militia out for revenge", but instead inspire people to take up the ideal. This is an impossible goal. Declarations of ind...
The following is my understanding and some of my experience. I believe Amazon uses something called an ASIN, not an ISBN. Self-publishing on Amazon does not give you an ISBN, but an ASIN. That k...
I wish I knew. But I can at least outline where, based on long and bitter experience, I think the challenges lie. Finding a way to surmount them I must leave to others. The first problem is one of...
How to present the question This section doesn't directly answer your questions, but address problems with such web pages that are all too common. I'm one of those that pretty much never answers ...
I wouldn't call Adobe InDesign a writing product but it has allowed the integration of animations, movies, audio for quite some time already. The caveat is that I believe this only applies to fixe...
