Posts by Jay
Do you really define every word every time you use it? That seems to me like it would be redundant and tedious. The first time I see a new word I want to know the definition. But I don't want to ha...
I agree with most of what others have said. Let me just add: Unless your goal is to attack this organization, what do you gain by using a real organization? You're obviously aware of the danger:...
I hear this worry from many beginning writers. Often the question includes something along the lines of "What legal steps can I take to protect my work from being stolen?". Here's my capsule advic...
If an author is a best seller, presumably the general public's opinion of his writing is high. Even if someone was taking polls on "Do you like the writing of X?", I think books sales are a much be...
I think the main advantage of using a fictional place is what you perhaps allude to in your comment about "adaptability". With a fictional place, you can invent whatever you want that helps your st...
Plagiarism is an academic violation. If you wrote a scholarly article for a professional journal and did not give proper credit to your sources, you would be guilty of plagiarism. If you were caugh...
I'd say yes, but ... not if it loses clarity. Warning labels have to be concise or people won't be able to read them, or won't bother to read them. For example, a label that says "HIGH VOLTAGE" e...
There are probably lots of names and titles that are coincidentally repeated in multiple books. To take a silly extreme, if someone tried to sue saying "He had a character in his book named John, a...
What makes anything in a story believable or unbelievable? Is it consistent with what we know of human nature, the laws of physics, etc? (If this is a fantasy or science fiction story, is it consis...
I agree with @mbakeranalecta that the purpose of tecnical writing is not to entertain but to inform. I recall a textboook on software development that I had in college where the text was regularly...
About 99+% of books printed in English use quote marks for dialog, not dashes. Why are you considering using dashes? Is there some advantage to this for your story? Like any rules of writing, you...
As others have said, if it doesn't advance the plot, leave it out. A story doesn't have to mention every little thing the characters do. A story that did would likely be mind-numbingly boring. "Th...
Grammarly is simply wrong. "Dragon" here appears to be used as an ordinary noun. There is no reason to capitalize it. The only reason to capitalize "dragon" would be if it was a proper name or part...
Several good answers and I don't want to repeat what they said, but let me add: I think you can almost always get away with ONE coincidence that gets the story rolling. Like suppose the story begi...
I don't read romance novels, but I've seen a few romance movies. It seems to me that finding some odd way to get the characters together is pretty typical of such movies. Having two people meet thr...
If I had a formula for what makes a book a bestseller, then I'd have a bunch of bestselling books to my name instead of the lame few hundred copies my books sell. I think the biggest factor in mak...
A story does not have to have a profound message that will change the life of everyone who reads it for it to be worth writing. There are many things that can make a story worthwhile. Sure, if you...
As others have said, people tend to notice others with common interests, and they tend to go to places where people with common interests are likely to go. Suppose you are really interested in, sa...
To the best of my knowledge, there is no widely-accepted rule of when asterisks are appropriate versus when extra white space is appropriate versus other possible conventions. To my mind, and for ...
As others have noted, you cite the source that you actually used. If A quotes or describes B, and you have read A but have not read B (whether because it's not available, you just didn't bother, or...
Arguably, one could say that the pronunciation of such a string is ambiguous. Would someone say it "em five five slash nine eight seven dot three" or "em fifty-five nine eighty-seven point three" o...
Side note: This problem isn't limited to computer jargon. There are many stories where the characters discuss things that all the characters would know or understand but a reader would not necessar...
I've never heard this style called "academic". I don't know if you just made that phrase up or you heard it somewhere. But since I was a wee lad in school 40 years ago, I've always been taught tha...
I've had quarrels with some of my friends where they say that some book or movie is bad because it depicts people doing evil things. And I say, But look HOW it depicts them! It clearly depicts them...
Several thoughts here. The first is, don't be discouraged by failure. Learn from it and move on. We all fail sometimes. Thomas Edison, when discussing his attempts to invent a practical light bulb...
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