Posts by Jay
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 ...
Are you copying material from this textbook into your book? Or do you mean that you are just writing, "See page 42 of Such-and-such book"? Usual disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. But as I understand ...
"with all the details included" If you mean that literally, then your book will be teaching the reader Japanese. Which probably won't make for an interesting novel. If you can really merge together...
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...
In my humble opinion, it's a good idea in a persuasive essay to at least acknowledge counter-arguments. If you simply ignore counter-arguments, and a reader is aware of them, his response is likely...
Several thoughts: In general, adapting a myth or a classic story is something that is done all the time. Many, many stories are described as "an updated version of Romeo and Juliet" or "the myth o...
In general, for a popular work it is bad style to include quotes in a foreign language. Most of your readers will not understand them. An old enough flavor of English is a "foreign language" for al...
Is the point of the story to realistically discuss how this person became mute, in some clinical sense, or to spin a story around the initial premise that he is mute? If the story is intended to b...
I think the general rule should be, Will the reader care? I heard a speech once by an American who was a reporter in Nazi Germany during World War 2. When I saw the advertisement for his lecture I...
This surely depends on the specific tool that you are using. The only tool that I am familiar with that meets your description is Javadoc, so I want to be cautious not to make assumption about how ...
Yes, you should try to be consistent. It is very distracting if you have bullet points with wildly inconsistent text. This looks silly: Include an invoice with the package. Free shipping; ...
If you're not knowledgeable in the field, then it is unlikely that anything you write will be convincing to someone who is. But as several have said, if you're writing a novel, then by definition i...
Bear in mind that a compact numerical date format like 01/02/2013 uses a different convention in the US than in Europe. In the US it's interpreted as month/day/year, while in Europe it's day/month/...
I'd say first, can you just translate the words in the text and not give the original? Like in the example you give in the comments on Fortiter's post, why not just write, "Toward the beach, there ...
Most stories in English are written in the past tense. If it happened five seconds ago, it's still past. Occasionally writers put a story in the present tense with the idea that this will give a s...
I haven't heard this five-word rule. But I can easily think of many sequences of five words that no one would seriously consider plagiarism. I think that I will was the first time that ...
I just checked my copy of MLA Handbook and I find no guidance on this case. The only example it gives has a single name. (I'll readily yield to someone who can point out that I missed something.) G...
We surely all have little quirks to our speech. Like my daughter once criticized my writing for using the word "surely" too much. (See, I used it on this post.) So how do you keep all your charact...
For something book-length, just don't do your re-read immediately. Don't Write chapter 1, re-read and update chapter 1, write chapter 2, re-read and update chapter 2, etc. Instead, write chapter 1,...
I'm not familiar with this "domain" level in taxonomy. That must be a new idea since I was in school. Of course Linnaeus originally defined the kingdom as the highest level, and he identified three...
On the flip side, let me comment that one thing I really dislike in many works of fiction is when we are told that someone is a villian, but he never actually does anything evil. To take a well-kno...
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