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'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. ...
Nope, works fine. Starting from the POV of a minor character to establish the setting is no problem at all; in fact, that can be an interesting prologue, particularly if you're dealing with a myste...
Find a key word or phrase and then start searching through Bartleby's and Shakespeare to see if any good quotes come up. Even if they don't, just looking at poetry might shake something loose.
For a screenplay, it is probably more important to be clear than to have excellent, flowing prose. (I'm not a screenwriter.) For the more-general case of descriptive prose, however, one approach ...
You can break up long stretches of dialogue with: Stage business (describing the person moving around, handling things, getting up and walking, sighing, laughing, eating, etc.) Reaction shots fro...
There is indeed such a term. Phil Farrand of The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek called this "being the cabbagehead." Certain information had to be revealed to the audience, but it was information...
Do you read? Study anything? Noodle around with puzzles or technical problems (in any field)? If so, try reacting to that. Write about something you've just learned and what further thoughts an...
You're quite correct in your assumption that digital publishing removes a lot of the necessity of typical length categories. Here's some things to bear in mind when coming to a decision. There's n...
Purchase it? Yes. I don't think you need to read it cover-to-cover unless you're a serious language geek who reads dictionaries for fun. ::cough::cough:: (Pulling out my 14th edition for reference...
Like all rules, this can be broken if the end result is what you want. Some people are "discovery writers" (aka "pants writers"). They just sit down to write, and watch the story unfold as if they...
I'll answer as a professor at a university: Stick to the script. I have 30 papers to grade! Going off script is, IMO, just proof you couldn't get your point across in the standard format so you d...
My experience is in software documentation (particularly programming interfaces), so I'll answer from that perspective. I think these principles are pretty general, but I've never written manuals ...
The key question to ask in deciding if something is in or out in technical communication is this: What would the user do differently if they knew this? If the answer it that they would not do any...
If your professor wants it, put it in, regardless of aesthetic considerations. If your professor wants to you type from the bottom up, in sparkling teal ink, in Comic Sans... that's how you format ...
Rather than "deployed": helped to launch I've no idea what an "enterprise application" is, so perhaps that could be rephrased. The problem with "he is an advocate for agile software development p...
For documentation that will be published outside your organization, it is usually important to follow a style guide (pretty much any one) so that all the documentation reads with one "voice" even t...
As with any technique, use it when it makes the text easier to understand, and don't overdo it (unless you're overdoing it deliberately as a stylistic choice, which should then be obvious).
Do parentheses inhibit clarity? They do and they don't, it's all down to individual use. When used well and skillfully, parentheses fulfill a function that no other punctuation or construction can ...
I'm assuming that you're talking about doing citations in the style of Kate Turabian's book *A Manual for Writers. (If that's not the case, than this answer may be incorrect.) The Table of Conten...
Asking for a ruling on a point of style like this is generally pretty futile in English. There is no central authority. However, style manuals or internal style sheets can provide guidance, even th...
