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As a software developer (C#, .NET, yada, yada), Monica's answer resounded nicely with me. (I don't have enough rep yet to comment on it, so my additions have to go here.) I would add that I find g...
One thing typical for all languages would be the speaker using the wrong word when they translate to the same word in their native language. For example, my native language has the same word for bo...
I don't know what else to do. If anyone has advice on how to make an ESL character sound realistic, I would appreciate it. All answers so far, as promoted by the question, aims for advancing u...
Start with the style guidelines from Oracle for Javadoc. While those guidelines are written for the Javadoc tool (and the Java language) in particular, the principles there apply to the correspond...
Short: It depend what you need. Write all you need to explain why your character is like that. Long: Firstly, I think you need to know what your character remember. It's obvious, but I know some p...
First of all you should make for each character a short personal description - what they like, what they don't like, what problems they have, how they relate to each other, and so on. Just little t...
If you're moving between timelines — one set of events happens in 1940 and one set happens in 1990 — the simplest way is to have one timeline per chapter and put the year (or detailed date) at the ...
As far as creative writing is concerned, nothing is right or wrong. It's entirely up to you, the writer, to describe the scenes in your own way. That said, writing just "Jennifer walked inside th...
If the POV is Jennifer's, we are getting her perspective, as if we're riding on her shoulder. Whether we get her thoughts is up to you, but if this is from Jennifer's eyes, then no, we cannot know ...
There are different levels of 3rd person narration, so it depends. Your narrator might describe the scene like someone viewing a movie. Or the narrator might be omniscient. What yours sounds lik...
In general, for a popular work it is bad style to include quotes in a foreign language. Most of your readers will not understand them. An old enough flavor of English is a "foreign language" for al...
I really don't have any special advice other than to just write. Don't worry about the quality of what you put onto paper, just commit it to paper. People will say "it's probably better than you th...
Just write. Seriously. Just write. Stop worrying about whether it sucks (it probably will). Write it. Get it out. Because then you can go back and fix it. You can't edit a blank page. But you can ...
The most common type of question raised by would-be writers is some version of "why can't I write?" The most common type of answer is "just write." If you look through this site, you will find qu...
It's up to you I personally like to treat thoughts the same as spoken speech, since they are in a different "voice" from the narrator’s. For me, it’s not a question of what’s spoken out loud, but ...
If your antagonist is living in the present time (but is 1000 years old), then is there any reason to believe that his speech hasn't evolved? Think about what happens to people when they move to a...
If I understand the question correctly... If he grew up speaking Old English (or whatever), is still alive, and communicates with present-day people, he will by definition have to have learned mod...
Use placeholders. If you have an idea of what you want a phrase to accomplish but you aren't there yet, just jot it down in brackets so you know what to do when you come back to polish. ("TK" is sl...
I would refine the advice thus: Translate the viewpoint character's experience into the language of the reader. That is, if the viewpoint character hears gibberish, you translate the experience of...
Depends on a few factors: 1) Is the narrative's point of view from the person who doesn't understand, the person who does, or omniscient? CJ Cherryh writes books where the humans are the outsider...
There is one very specific situation in which it is a good idea to write down the words spoken in the language that is not understood by the point-of-view character, and it occurs when you want the...
I'd go with "Edited by." You are not the author (the originator). You took existing work and edited it to make it readable. I think "edited" makes your relationship to the work clear.
Imagine if you set out to write a book based on a true story. You then interviewed your main subject talking about her experiences. That interview was your primary source material. You would be ...
You may want to have a look at KeepNote. It's open source and runs on a number of different platforms (Windows and Linux packages are available), but it doesn't do everything you want out of the bo...
The term is metadiscourse, or communication about the communication. Sometimes they help guide the reader through a complex line of reasoning. Sometimes they add emphasis or rhythm. Sometimes they'...
