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I would put them at the end as appendices. That way they're part of the documentation but not in the way when someone goes to look up a feature. But I actually like the idea of having them as part ...
It's vanishingly rare to need a constructed language in written fiction. Orson Scott Card sums this up in How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy: Invented languages are a lot more fun to mak...
I find thoughts inside speech quotes to be incredibly distracting, because I have to spend time figuring out if the person is thinking or talking. So don't do that, whatever punctuation you use for...
The quoted passage is completely comprehensible; it's clear that the question is being asked by the character. The alternative would be absurd - the narrator making some kind of parenthetical comme...
But those words are a quote, so they should be quoted. If your text is in first person — so that your narration is actually the thoughts of the narrator speaking to the reader — then you'd use spe...
Honestly, I have no problem with writing single letters or numbers in dialogue, particularly if they are acronyms. All the following look fine to me: "The variable x is greater than the variable ...
I write my antagonists to truly believe they are doing the right thing. They just begin with different beliefs about the world than my protagonists, that also truly believe they are doing the right...
There's no universal standard for this, or at least not in fiction. Books generally pick one style and stick with it. Larger narrative breaks than a section break can be indicated by starting a new...
Gael Baudino sort of did this in her Water! trilogy. In the three books (O Greenest Branch, The Dove Looked In, Branch and Crown) she kept switching not merely narrator and POV, but the entire na...
Depending on whether the character actually stutters or just rewords mid-thought, you might write: "Lo— I mean, Warden," he amended. "Lor— er, Warden," he amended. "Lo— Warden," he am...
Outlines vary in how much text they cover; some people might write a multi-page outline for the same content for which another would write: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy goes to mad-s...
A like the Chipperish Media "How Story Works" way -- instead of binary conflicts, characters are built on Triangles: weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and strengths. The same trait may be any one of ...
Play with visual cues Darkness is (an authors) friend when it comes to horror. Your reader/player can't see what's in front of them, which plays together with the *fear of the unknown already men...
If you have a full sentence as a parenthetical, you generally don't capitalize and punctuate it that way. So it normally appears: Dick and Jane watch Spot run (they know Spot likes to chase car...
Word Count and Page Count matter nothing when compared to what they contain. If your story is in it's final form, it is in it's final form. It doesn't matter if it's one hundred pages or one. If yo...
1) Don't worry about it for this draft. Write your entire book. Get it down on paper. Then put in a drawer for a month. Then, when it's finished and you have a little distance, you can go back an...
I suggest you revise your current question to reflect a more general nature. Ask how quotes like this can be revised to achieve the effect you desire. "You're John Doe. Still." The clerk raise...
If your example is part of narration in a story, you have it written exactly right. There's no need for the acronym. "aka" the acronym originally came from law enforcement when describing someone...
The difference is that the first sentence doesn't have a tag. It's a line of dialogue followed by a complete sentence. The second sentence is dialogue followed by a dialogue tag. Your first set ...
I like the third version, without colons, because the visual break and the code formatting makes it clear that this is a new "clause," or thought, and the piece of code is not a grammatically corre...
I agree with both your points: if your first sentence stood alone, I'd omit that. But in sequence with the other two, it sounds better to leave it in. There is an actual rule in English linguisti...
As @what sensibly points out, just because you have an opinion doesn't mean it's wrong. Mention your biases up front. "I really enjoy rhyming poetry, and free verse doesn't work for me on an aest...
Given your quote in context, the obscenity works. It's blunt and to the point, and since you are in fact pointing out that people don't have time or energy for philosophy when they're starving, it'...
When I taught ENGL100, I advised students to minimize quotes (still maximize citations for their summaries and paraphrases unless it was to indicate "poetry or precision". The quote you indicated ...
The word lyrical does not mean "like a song lyric". If anything the derivation probably goes the other way. Lyrical means expressing the writer's emotions in a beautiful or imaginative way. Thus yo...
