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Over my years on StackExchange I've come to view answering SE questions as its own, highly specialized writing subgenre, with its own demands, and its own ideal format. By trial and error, and obs...
I am trying to expand the depth of my writing beyond simple storytelling. Although my previous novel was an action/adventure, I realized it has a deeper point than entertainment. Dean Koontz offers...
THE ISSUE There must be a catch-phrase or soundbite to describe this scenario, but so far, I've been unsuccessful locating that term, and my efforts to answer this question have been flat as well....
Edit: Perhaps a list of words prone to mis-use would serve the need, here. Is anyone aware of a resource that lists words with emotional baggage? Example: I use the expression 'enormity of...
I decided a few chapters into a book I'm writing that I dislike present tense, and that I would need to go back and make all instances of present tense past tense to maintain consistency. However, ...
I introduced a young person (called Raven) who the main character was friends with in my story; Raven is an excellent student who the main character is also teaching music to. The story is the resu...
A book that I'm currently writing called Surge features an enemy faction called the Degenerates that are heavily inspired by the Scythians (Indo-Iranian horse nomads that ruled the Eurasian Steppe ...
I work on developer documentation at a tech startup. As of now, we implement the following feedback mechanisms: We have a thumbs-up/down feedback system on each page of the docs site. If a user c...
As technology advances and workflows are streamlined, some have turned to automated tools such as Doxygen, Sphinx, Swagger, etc. in order to generate technical documentation automatically. What ar...
This is something I've pondered before. I asked about one gesture on yahoo answers long ago. All I got was a guy saying that even he didn't know the term for it (it was the gesture where someone ho...
In my story, there's this big bad, who needs to be destroyed. That is the main goal for about the last third of the video game. So the group of heroes manages to destroy him! ... but I don't want t...
I'm looking for a dialog tag for when someone is in awe and saying something along the lines of "oooooo!" or "wooooooow!" "Oooooooo!" they ______ed. Does it exist? If so, what is it?
It seems like many manuals and technical documents prefer passive voice over active voice. Is this true, or is it just my perception? If so, why?
Quickly communicating data lineage to other stakeholders in our organization has become increasingly difficult as we scale. What are effective strategies to address this and keep it maintained? A...
We have a tool that we cannot replace that does not support single sourcing. As a result, with instructions that involve the same node, we either repeat the same dozen steps over and over, or refer...
In our documentation, we write binary numbers like this: 1010 But we write hexadecimal numbers like this: 0xABAB Now, according to the GCC compiler conventions: Numbers are normally written in...
I want to write a fantasy novel with a female protagonist, and I want to familiarize myself with reader expectations. Is there still a tradition of (medieval-type) fantasy by and for women, and wha...
It's well known that live presenters are often advised to add a dose of humour in order to engage the audience better. However, I very rarely see humour in written technical documentation; this de...
Frequently, at least in the software world, it seems that terms get assigned a meaning over time that is more general than the original definition. REST is a good example of this. While REST refe...
In technical translation (e.g. of manuals), the quality of the source text often is not very high. This concerns not only the language used, but also the structure of the whole document. Should te...
I was asked to prepare an overview of an existing IT architechture and provide a document that consists of weaknesses analysis and suggestions on how each of the weak spots can be improved. How to...
My novel is developed in an East Asian environment (specifically Japan) and my main character is not Asian, she is from Central América and is Mixed Race. Now, my main character is going to refer t...
My story is a little bit weird because it starts in a Spanish speaking country and then moves to Japan where everybody speaks japanese and I don't know how to introduce this new language that will ...
I am going through a difficult time in my life and, as a keen amateur writer I’m seriously considering writing about my experience. My motivation is two fold, firstly I believe it will help me, but...
Background: I'm working on a game that has multiple paths for players to choose from. The choices the players make can lead them to very different endings. There are many bad endings but only one t...
