Posts by Paul A. Clayton
As others have suggested increasing the length of the name in letters and adding markings (accent marks, apostrophes, et al.) may help make the names more distinctive. In some cases this can be acc...
The following options may be helpful for avoiding overuse of specific noun-adjective pairs: Replace the noun with another noun which has a similar relationship to the adjective. This is the simp...
It is not ungrammatical to use two absolute phrases connected by a conjunction (like "and"). Long sentences can be more difficult to read and tend to slow the pace of the narrative, but in this cas...
Even if readers are radically and nearly exclusively committed to the protagonist, there are several ways for the protagonist to "speak after death". The protagonist's legacy can speak. (This is c...
There seem to be two basic issues in this question. The first is similar to the issue of when a pronoun's antecedent is clear; is the extra information necessary for an understanding of the basic m...
Lyrical refers to song-like qualities. Songs are inherently emotive and use rhythm and sound to convey a sense beyond the literal. The rhythmic aspect includes not merely higher-level structure but...
When I first wrote "Gawain's Guilt-Girdle" (14 lines of verse) I introduced it with a short (modernized/translated) quotation from the Middle English work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I think m...
Having encountered errors in technical documentation that almost certainly came from incomplete editing after copying from earlier documentation, I am curious about what techniques can be used to a...
In a hypertext document, when the title of a short work (which is enclosed in quotation marks) is a link should the quotation marks be included as part of the link text? Do common style guides gene...
When critiquing another's writing I find myself making suggestions that are clearly biased toward how I would write the work. This effect seems particularly prevent for poetry, where suggestions ar...
