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I'm a contractor who has been working on a project (a developer guide website) for months with another contractor writer. We spent a lot of time: Interviewing end users Designing the deliverable...
Some of the best books I read have a heap of metaphors, awesomely describing the characters' surroundings or the characters themselves. My creativity appears to be limited in metaphors. I want to a...
In the second book of his Inheritence Cycle, Christopher Paolini makes the grievous error of landing his main character in the middle of a serene woodland where he must sit and talk with an old elf...
So I'm writing a story and the setting is that there are two worlds: the world of humans and the world of (insert species name here). Now I'm wondering if it's okay to use the terms/words "people,...
First of all I'm completely against this idea but a few people who contribute to the technical documentation project constantly suggest that to attain a short, quick, economic, comprehensive messag...
I am writing a paper but I don't know how to move back to the main section after I'm done writing a sub-section, like this: 1.1 Main section 1.1.1 subsection 1 1.1.2 subsection 2 As I write long...
I've just downloaded an open-source script-writing program, and have started converting the scripts for an anime I've been writing into industry-standard formatting. There are a few points in the ...
Following up on my previous question, "How to make the villain's motives understandable if his logic is flawed?", how can I let the reader know that the lack of logic is on the character's side, in...
Is it better to push yourself in your writing? To attempt bigger and deeper stories than you've done before? K.M. Weiland says so. But then there's this thread (which is talking about music perform...
I don't know whether you do this or not, but one of the best ways of proofreading I've found is to print out the document and read it through in the paper format, rather than trying to proofread wr...
I think the answer to your specific problem is that there is no simple solution. There is no trick. Reading out loud does definitely help, but ultimately if your mind is subconsciously fixing the e...
I find that most of my mistakes occur at or across line breaks. After your first proof-reading pass, change the margin slightly on your window - perhaps just by half an inch. This will cause all t...
You can work together at the same document with tools like Google docs, but that maybe gets a little bit messy over time if you want to track all the changes. To make the changes visible (I'm not ...
Software developers deal with projects with millions of lines of code and collaborative writing projects deal with content on the order of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of text. I thi...
One thing to remember is that our concept of time and specifically splitting much of our experience into units of time ("he held his breath for a second" and "I'll see you in 15 minutes" and "It wi...
Think of how you talk about other species in reality. There are no "women" or "men" among dogs, chicken, or ants. The words "man" and "woman" specifically denote human males and females. But there...
As you may know, Thomas, there was a question quite similar to yours put by KeithS a little while ago: Avoiding the "as you know" trope in exposition. There were several answers including mine whi...
There's no single standard about this. Whether you engage your readers is up to you, in some cases up to your editor at the publication in question (or perhaps their policies). Barring that kind o...
Using "he/she" will annoy some of your readers; using singular "they" will annoy others. And referring to a user as "it" will seem weird to most people. What I do is to write around the problem wh...
The label should be as short as possible without creating ambiguity. In many workplaces, the employer is required (OSHA, ISO, FDA, etc.) to train anyone who would be working in a particular area w...
Kindall tackled the legal aspect. As for reception/perception considerations, here's the rule of thumb I'd use: If you're using the same word in the same way for the same thing, and your story is ...
First off, "grok" is not copyrighted; you can't copyright individual words, even made-up ones. Therefore fair use (a defense against an infringement claim) does not apply. That doesn't mean it's im...
It depends on your audience. Blessed Geek suggested UML enumeration, but this assumes that the users understand UML. Your question shows that you know technology well enough to know the capabiliti...
If this is user-facing documentation, then make up a data dictionary that describes the tables and columns with supplementary blurbs about the meaning of the data (e.g. the meanings of specific val...
My top recommendation is this: Identify what the story is attempting to do. Different stories are different creatures. "I'm pretty sure I know how this ends!" can be a harsh indictment for a myst...
