Posts by Jay
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...
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...
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...
As Darkocean noted, the instant you write your story, it is protected by copyright law. "Is there any official body who can control any type of theft or plagiarism of written content?" Yes. In the...
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...
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...
Perhaps the most common reason to tell a story out of order is to put an exciting scene at the beginning to get the reader interested. Then go back and put in all the exposition to explain how that...
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...
Advice of that sort should rarely be taken absolutely. If you get advice like that from a reasonable person, they will not say, "Never use ..." but rather "Avoid ..." There are lots of writing tech...
In English we normally relate stories entirely in the past tense. "She had green eyes." If she's still alive presumably she still has green eyes, but that isn't the point. You're talking about what...
The key is to make the connection reasonably obvious. Simple example. "Bob and Fred entered the office. He sat behind the desk." Who sat behind the desk, Bob or Fred? We don't know. You'd have to ...
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