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I have been spending time online since yesterday trying to understand the difference between analytical summary writing and critical writing. I intend to write an analytical summary essay on the t...
Long experience has taught many of us that when you send a busy person an email with more than one question, they only answer the first one and ignore the rest. Thus many of us have gotten into the...
"Concise" doesn't mean "very short"; it means "no more verbose than it needs to be". In your case, you have needs that establish a minimum length. Trying to fight against that will only lead to f...
Not overkill at all. However, the Chicago Manual of Style is not really ideal for technical writing (and is intended as a look-it-up reference, not a cover-to-cover read). It is a good guide to gen...
I've been writing on the Mac for a number of years now. Over that time, I've settled into using Scrivener for project organization, version control, and major publishing; and Sublime Text 2 + Markd...
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...
So I may be inferring to much from your question but... It may be worth your time to look at a collaboration suite...with a shop that small it wont cost much and the tools offer cloud storage and ...
You absolutely can publish your book with CreateSpace and NOOK at the same time. Each print version needs its own ISBN. I wrote to B&N about this exact issue, and this was their response, emp...
As the author of 5 tech books (all available in ebook format and published by O'Reilly Media), I can tell you that the O'Reilly party line is essentially that "DRM logic is flawed". We're in a tran...
Let's say I'm writing a sci-fi novel. I want to use a word which another writer has coined, which has become well-recognized outside the original book, for the name of an alien species in my story....
I think the best way to attenuate the blandness in your superhuman character is by dropping the superficiality of invulnerability. Your protagonist might be an epitome of impeccability but what you...
I created my own language for a game, and I've come to learn a lot from it. I am no expert on linguistics, and my tips are a bit random/rambling, but maybe they might help. Here's some of what I w...
In addition to Lauren's list, here are a few things I do: Give each character a distinct background. Some possible elements to vary are geography, culture, ethnicity, education, age, friends, fa...
I think the general rule should be, Will the reader care? I heard a speech once by an American who was a reporter in Nazi Germany during World War 2. When I saw the advertisement for his lecture I...
Let's say I'm creating a unique world for my book. New planet, maybe new species, complex society with complex rules, history, government, and so on. Some of these details are absolutely necessary ...
I'm currently working on my first book, a sci-fi comedy set on an alternate history Earth which has progressed at twice the rate of our own planet (they were at our current tech when William the Co...
Since we don't have the sample text that was analyzed, it's hard to answer this question in any specific sense. But I'd guess that this overuse of prepositions is actually the overuse of prepositio...
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...
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 ...
The idea of the anointed one is as old as recorded history and recorded literature. But we should remember that this idea exists in the context of societies in which everyone has a specific role to...
In general, your characters will be assumed to be fictional, unless you give overwhelming reason for them to be considered otherwise. Which means that you're asking the wrong question. There's no ...
Note, this might be off topic and belong on World Building SE? I have always been far more interested with building the world my stories take place in than the stories themselves. I will spend lar...
I wouldn't say he's bland by any means, but this character is definitely talkative, and he's supposed to be. He's not the main character but does show up quite a bit. He tends to lecture and ramble...
Write your Silmarillion instead. Tolkien created his Elvish languages because he was a professor of linguistics. He created the world of LOTR to have someone to speak his languages. The Silmaril...
Sometimes authors invent regions, which are very similar to real ones, e. g. Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo (which is similar to real city of Aracataca) or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha Cou...
