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Writing is definitely a craft, and as a craft it definitely has technique, and technique can be described and taught. Writing is also all surface. There is nothing hidden underneath. All the tech...
Let's see, in order: It discourages using contractions, even though they make writing more concise. I'll confess never understood this one. I do use contractions in formal writing. They're in...
All caps is for shouting. Small caps could be used as a stylistic device at the beginning of a chapter to look nice, but beyond that I'm struggling to think of where they'd be appropriate. Maybe ...
DITA is an XML format, so any editor or IDE that supports XML will work for you. Options with good XML support range from Eclipse (free) to Oxygen and Epic (several hundred dollars per seat). Of ...
Work with reputable proofreaders and designers, who have proven track records with satisfied clients. Anybody with a reputation to maintain will have no profit from plagiarizing clients' work. Fir...
In addition to "Work with reputable proofreaders and designers," as Standback correctly notes, you can also add a non-disclosure agreement to your contract. The language might state that the conten...
You're mixing up the terms. There is the protagonist, and there is the narrator. Narration has perspective. The narrator is the voice in which the book is told. If the story is told using "he/s...
You don't need a publishing house for that (and anyway your intended distribution is too low for such companies to be interested). You just want to self-publish your work. When I self-published a...
We aren't lawyers, and I don't think there's a single hard and fast rule for this. Rights can vary depending on geography, time, and author preference. There are works which are now in the publi...
There's very little you can do to improve the flow of the articles, short of rewriting the articles themselves. A collection of columns will always be a collection of works written separately. Howe...
Your academic department may have posted guidelines for this. For example, the Rutgers Graduate school has posted an Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Style Guide, complete with sample pages. They...
To add on to Psicofrenia's excellent answer: Simply put, a writer writes. All the time. If you're not at your desk, you're still writing in your head. The notebook gives you somewhere to put your t...
I'd say it's erotic if: 1) the sex is a major part of the action (not necessarily the plot) AND 2) the text is explicit enough that if it were a movie, minors couldn't see it. So something whi...
One of my business clients has a similar issue, although not with blog posts. They leave the information in present tense and do not change it after the fact. This sometimes means that they are pos...
I've read at least one book which successfully did this; the author just titled each chapter "Bruno" and "Melusine," depending on whose perspective it was. The timeline was mostly chronological, al...
In many cases you don't actually need, or necessarily want, to describe the gesture itself. It is often enough, or even preferable, to (a) convey that there was a gesture and (b) convey its meanin...
Treat details like Chekhov's Gun. They should only be there if they serve a purpose. If the purpose is to create atmosphere, explain the setting to the reader for the first time, place a macguffi...
You're getting there. Push it farther. I think your first and last stanzas/poems have the right idea. Be rougher. Be angrier. Don't worry about grammar. Show more images, and have them more raw: fi...
If your qualification is related to your story, then yes. For example, Mercedes Lackey keeps hawks and horses, both of which feature prominently in her stories. So I know that any details about the...
Why does apparent technology have to actually be technology? Can't it be either mundane or magical instead, even if in our world we would call it science or tech? Strength and speed can be enhanc...
I don't have a problem with them (they're called bookisms, I believe) if: You don't overdo it. It's tempting to make every dialogue tag something vivid or extra. Don't. D.W. Smith pointed out in ...
Your problem is that you're trying to use one tool for two opposing tasks. You're using an outline as a guide for writing (what happens next). You want to use your outline to gauge the size of y...
Obviously, both female participation and female representation are important. Female participation is more immediately important, because you're dealing with your actual students, and it's crucia...
In the absence of a particular style guide, I would put the page numbers on the top of the page, toward the outer side. When printing single-sided, this means put them in the top right corner. When...
Context is important, and this question is hard to answer. But I'll try. Sentence length is something that creates a rhythm in the text. For example, let's think of a situation where you have suc...
