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When writing a list like this, you have several options for how you want to style the text. In business writing, such as an email, you can always format this as a bulleted list: Please send ...
Is it correct? Strictly speaking, it's not wrong, but it's really hard to hear someone saying a parenthesis. Is it usual? No. In fact, I can't remember ever seeing it. Is it understandable? I gue...
Find a recording device. Press record. Hold your nose tightly. Speak your dialogue. Add coughing, wheezing, and other effects as appropriate. Press stop. Press play. Transcribe.
Yes, it's certainly possible that posting on the internet could lead to someone stealing your ideas. But will this actually happen? There are risks, however small, to showing your work to anyone. M...
Everything is about him. The other characters talk about him, plot about him, worry about him, try to contact him. Everything is about what he's doing or where he's going and with whom. Scenes wh...
From the Scrivener for Windows documentation (emphasis mine): If you need your work to enter a standard word processor workflow, this will be your go-to method. MultiMarkdown's ODF support is c...
Ah, the "you can write in one context, so you must be an expert in writing in another context" fallacy. I've been on the receiving end of that too. Being a good academic writer, or engineering wr...
I'm at a different company now than I was when I asked this question, but the new one had the release-notes problem too. Here is how we solved it (at doc's instigation): When a bug is filed, if ...
The Rama series by Arthur Clarke would fit that bill. the first book was very hard scifi, basically a history book, and books 2 to 4 were a trilogy about a specific family and their travails.
I think it's the "tongues" which caught everyone's eye. That faux high English hearkens back to Tolkien's diction, which makes people recall his version. Change it up. Rearrange the order and add ...
Raise the stakes. Give him some urgent reason for doing something or being there. Take something away from him which he has to find, recover, or fix. Add a ticking clock. Why is he visiting his ...
You should establish the character early on, but I don't think you can develop anyone all in the beginning. What point is there for the story, then, if the character is done developing? The reade...
Get it on paper, and make sure it's funny to you. Then find beta readers and editors and see if it's funny to others. You can always fix something after it's written, but you can't edit a blank p...
...shout-outs by the main character to those other stories, as well as celebrities. The hope is that any readers of similar fiction will find the references and shoutouts funny. However, I don...
I think an abstract or quick summary isn't a bad idea at all, especially if your audience is not necessarily familiar with the process or the parts, or if there's a lot of jargon involved. I may ...
Well, if it's fanfic specifically, then something about the source material got your brain going. Go back and rewatch the show, play the game, chat online with other fans, surf tumblr, read other f...
In the context of a formatted manuscript, the "word count" isn't the precise number of words, nor is it directly inferred from the number of pages. What you're actually doing here is finding the n...
I've seen this done with a "watermark" that says (usually) "sample data" (kind of like this, from here, though that's a table rather than a chart). Think of the "draft" watermark you sometimes see...
Before starting your story, write as much as you need to feel comfortable with the character. That could be pages and pages, or only a paragraph. (For example, the Harry Potter trio were asked to w...
Another possible alternative might be to have the younger relative find a letter, diary or something like that written by and set aside by the older relative. The text could recount events from the...
The best translations I've seen (Dante's Commedia, Beowulf) have the original and the translation together. That way you can read what the sense of the text is, but if you want, you have the origin...
I would find this very confusing (I'm in the U.S.). I would expect thoughts to be in italics, not in quotes.
"Hard and fast rules" come from the style guide you're following; all else is convention. I've seen both styles in fiction, so to decide which to use you can look at examples of similar type (genr...
I don't see how a deadline could improve the quality of what you're writing; if you don't leave yourself enough time and make yourself rush, it could have the opposite effect. It can certainly moti...
The simplest solution is for Stephen King to alter his byline somehow — to Steve King, or Stephen [X.] King (whatever his middle initial is), or Stefan King, or his childhood nickname Steverino Pol...
