Posts by System
The Microsoft Manual of Style puts it well: Don’t try to be funny. Jokes, slang, and sarcasm are context-specific and hard to translate and localize. What’s funny to you might offend or alienat...
Whenever I go to a bookstore, they either do not have any poetry books at all, or only a very small selection of classics shelved alongside Homer and Shakespeare. When you search "market for poetr...
Depending on how you ask, between one and ten percent of the population of Europe and about five percent of the US population identify as LGBT. About two thirds of them come out beyond their family...
Not receiving feedback from publishers, or receiving a rejection, does not tell you anything about the quality of your work at all. Publishers reject good books because they don't fit their catalog...
Unlike the engineered hermaphroditic humans in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan universe, who might be speaking a future version of English, your hermaphrodites are an alien species and do not spe...
Which language do the French use when they search programming related information on the web? My mother tongue is German, but when I search information on the web on topics that aren't specific to...
It is completely unproblematic, if real people are part of the world that your fictional characters inhabit. For example, your detective Smith might see President Trump on tv and hear part of a spe...
Simply think about how you learn the background of other people in real life. You get some hints from what people do, what others say about them, and from the context in which they appear. Then yo...
It really doesn't matter IMO. It depends on how you feel with your story. It sounds to me like you have it planned well. Do you know what it will be called?
I seems to me that no one really took into account that we are talking about freewriting. The whole point of freewriting is that you don't stop to reflect, but write down your stream of consciousn...
My rule of thumb is "the right information at the right time", especially in content that's supposed to be consumed on a topic rather than a chapter/book basis. Sure, this leads to some repetition ...
Qualities of the documentation itself, even quantitive ones, usually have little intrinsic value. However, quantitive impact of docs on other areas can be often precisely measured and meaningfully...
In language, when a mistake becomes common enough, it's standard usage. One way to check whether the original meaning of a word has evolved beyond your preferred usage is to check a dictionary or ...
The rule is simple in general: use the present tenses when discussing events in literary works. One situation where this gets more complicated is where you have to switch timelines because, for exa...
I concur that Does DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Apply to Documentation? pretty much answers the question on what is best for the user. However, the question was: Which one is more futureproof? ...
You see this a lot in fantasy fiction, where everyone on the planet (and sometimes beyond) speaks the same language, even though it makes absolutely no logical sense for them to have any knowledge ...
I believe the key question to ask yourself - and your marcomm colleagues - is the aim of each piece of documentation you are producing. Using your example, you can have two kinds of introductory m...
If the technology was transported from the future to the age in question, it might be considered time-travel sci-fi. If the technology was developed in the Medieval period independently of temporal...
One way to demonstrate a character's desire implicitly is to examine the consequences. What is at stake? What does the character stand to lose if she can't reach her goal? If the character fails to...
For desensitizing yourself, I'd question the wisdom of that. If it's bad writing, it should hurt. Let it hurt if you want to learn from it. I purposefully read bad fiction in order to keep my criti...
As a reader, the first thing I want to know about a character is why I should care about this character. In an action-adventure setting, without knowing more about what's going on, I'd suggest lett...
This is a difficult question to answer, as, in my opinion, this is largely a matter of opinion. The short answer is to do both and see what works best for you.
What are various ways to reduce reader fatigue by adjusting scenes? Make sure there is a point to the scene. Does the POV character have a goal? If not, consider adding one. A scene with a goal w...
As author Eric T. Benoit once said, your job as a writer isn’t to convey emotion, but to invoke it. Trying to convey emotion more often than not leads to tired clichés of clenched fists and sweat d...
All of reality exists inside the cosmic womb of the goddess. People, planets, animals, etc, were all created when she bled into the universe, birthing life to all things. The faith honors this even...
