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We just addressed this recently, and the excellent answer suggested was guillemets. « and »
You won't like this answer, but I'm going to give it anyway. The best way to convert handwriting into text is to type it up. Don't skip it just because it's a little tedious. Typing up work is a...
You're suffering from impacted arborvision: you have so much pressure on you that you can no longer see the forest for the trees. Get an editor. Ask someone else to look at your work. Let a fresh ...
This is fine as written, so long as later in the section you have Second and Third or Last and so forth. I'd make each numbered item a separate paragraph, regardless of length, so it's easier to fo...
Historical re-enactors share your problem. Here are some of the things we do: Read history books, sure, but sometimes it's the museum catalogs that show everything from art to architecture to eve...
I assume your students are interested in self-publishing. Traditional publishing is a whole different ball game. Key Factors To Consider Rights. One of the main draws of self-publishing is that ...
My feeling is that if your story is set in the real world with real-world technology and does not involve magic or sci-fi tech, you should do some research (Wikipedia does not qualify) to make sure...
At its strictest, iambic pentameter is just as rigid as you've described. "Poetry" is a dactyl (X-/-/), not an iamb (/-X), hence it shouldn't fit anywhere in an iamb-only sequence. Likewise, by the...
If you want to write like a native speaker, you should also be listening. So listen to radio broadcasts, podcasts, and TV shows. (Movies can vary; because they are shorter, they can be narratively ...
Introduce a cabbagehead character. "Cabbagehead" is a term from Phil Farrand, who wrote the Nitpicker's Guides to various Star Trek series. He points out that particularly in NextGen, it became ne...
Lauren's and SF's answers give good advice for dealing with the necessary explanation. My additional advice is: make sure it's really necessary. Driving a car is a pretty complex task (ask anyone...
It used to be common practice in scholarly works and in popular works aimed at educated audiences to quote works in the the language they were written in, at least for major classical and modern Eu...
Plagiarism is like patent law: You cannot patent something that is not original; you cannot patent "cake" or "bread". Only original mechanisms can be patented: The common screw has been around for ...
In reverse order: As far as plagiarism, it depends on what you're doing with your take-off. Is it mean to be performed in public? Are you trying to get a recording contract? Does the music of you...
Translating another writer's book, you are limited: you have only the words that the author wrote. You get to move them around, because grammar has to match. You get to look for expressions in the ...
If you have so many unfamiliar or questionable terms that you think the reader will need both original and translation, by all means add a glossary. More information never hurts. As long as it's in...
In addition to reading (as suggested by others), practice writing in contexts that are already available to you. (Starting a blog is good too, but if you can't build a reader base that can be disc...
There are a few ways to solve this: 1) Switch narrators. Everything is told by your main character until his/her death, at which point some other character finishes the story. 2) Your narrator ...
I have the 2011 edition of the AP Stylebook, which gives the following as correct examples: He promised this: The company will make good all the losses. There were three considerations: ex...
'Coming up with an idea' is a self-defeating exercise. Ideas are everywhere - you just have to get used to recognising them as an idea, catching them and recording them. My advice is simply to carr...
Way back in 10th grade, when we were learning how to do research papers on the back of a coal shovel, our teacher had us take all our notes on 3x5 cards. We had to submit them as part of the grade ...
I think your first example is perfect, making sure that you drop out words from the speaker to indicate the passage of time as your foreground characters are talking "over" the speaker. It makes pe...
I saw an effective example of this in 1634: The Baltic War (David Weber & Eric Flint) recently. The factors that made it work were: The background speech was in italics (as you've done here)...
If you're aware that your work sounds a lot like someone else's, start changing yours until it's not so close. If you have to keep justifying "But it's not Saw!" then you're too close. Change a met...
Introducing the protagonist later in the book is generally done when there's a large cast involved. In a situation like this, who the reader should consider the "main" character is less important. ...
