Activity for Monica Cellio
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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A: How do I know when I should rewrite vs. editing my first chapter The order in which the reader sees it is not necessarily the order in which the author wrote it. You can use this to get past rewrite loops or other blockers. When writing (both fiction and non-fiction), I sometimes insert "placeholders" -- I'm going to need a scene or section here that does X, Y... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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Should posting on Meta affect reputation? When we launched this community, we did not yet have the ability to set different reputation grants for different categories. We've had this for a while but we failed to follow up before now, sorry. Do you want us to change posts on Meta to not award rep for upvotes or subtract it for downvotes? ... (more) |
— | 10 months ago |
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A: Why was this question about authors shortening their sentences closed as a duplicate? The core of both questions is: why didn't these authors simplify complex sentence structures? It's hard to see how the answers would be significantly different for semicolons versus splitting into two sentences. I'm not sure "why did these authors do X?" is on-topic on Writing anyway (I can't rec... (more) |
— | about 2 years ago |
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How can we grow this community? Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged participants. The folks already here are doing good work; our challenge is to find more people like you ... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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A: Flags page returns 500 error when having a flag on a deleted post This was a data error -- the post you flagged was spam, we do some extra stuff when nuking spam, and something went wrong. Fixed now. You won't see the post you flagged because it's completely gone, but you won't get an error page now either. (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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HTML tags versus CSS classes: is one preferred over the other for the same styling? We publish documentation online using HTML. For things like fixed parameter names and other code literals, we use `` tags. My question is about styling these in tables. On our reference pages, we list parameters in tables -- parameter name in the first column, description in another. I have bee... (more) |
— | over 2 years ago |
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How can we integrate a lightweight public ticketing system into our documentation feedback form? We publish a substantial documentation set online. Each page has a place at the bottom that asks "was this helpful? (Y/N)", and if the person chooses "no" we offer a textbox. We collect all this feedback internally (it feeds into our internal ticketing system, except for the spam), but to the user,... (more) |
— | almost 3 years ago |
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In 2021, which publishers distribute novellas? The Hugo awards are prominent fan awards in the SF&F genre. In 2021, I noticed that all of the finalists in the Novella category are from a single publisher, Tor.com. Novellas have, I understand, historically been harder to market than either novels or short stories, though I don't know if that's c... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How do I brainstorm for writing positively about myself? Writing positively about yourself can be hard. It feels like bragging, which feels rude. What I've found helps is to frame it as a specific marketing project. It's not that I would go around boasting in general, but this year-end performance self-assessment is where I have to show my value and acc... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How do we prevent Madcap Flare from injecting non-breaking spaces in our documentation? It turns out that "Global" doesn't mean global in Flare. We haven't figured out what it actually means, but to fix this you have to select "XML Editor" from the drop-down menu shown in the screen shot and then change it there. I changed it in both to be safe, and our team is no longer getting unw... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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How do we prevent Madcap Flare from injecting non-breaking spaces in our documentation? We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and it has an annoying property: if you happen to have the shift key down when you type a space, it inserts a non-breaking space (` `). Our documentation covers SQL, so things like `CREATE TABLE` are common and too often come out as `CREATE TABLE`... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: How do we get Flare to stop modifying .gitignore? I received a response from Flare's technical support. There was a bug in Flare's git integration in some older versions (at least 2019r2; not sure how much farther back). This bug was fixed in Flare 2020, but the result is that if people are using mixed versions, as we are, then there's a tug of wa... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: What are some ways to encourage team members to contribute and maintain a centralized wiki? There's no quick or complete fix, but the following things have worked for me. Plant the seeds early First, involve those new hires. When everything is new to them, you are in a better position to plant "culture" seeds. Maybe your old-timers have gotten used to not documenting anything, but t... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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How do we get Flare to stop modifying .gitignore? We use Madcap Flare for our documentation, and the project is checked into git. (In case this matters, this is a locally-hosted git server, not GitHub.) The project uses a .gitignore file to avert commits of output files and assorted Flare byproducts that don't belong in source control. We do ... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Technical Writer Skill Set Some core skills for a technical writer are: - Ability to communicate effectively in writing. - Ability to understand the subject matter (what you're documenting) from the user's perspective, including the user's needs. - Ability to understand the subject matter enough to reason about its behavi... (more) |
— | about 3 years ago |
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A: Finishing link entry with enter sends the post instead That's a bug, yes. :-( Thanks for the report. As a workaround, if you choose[^1] the "insert" button instead of using "enter", it inserts the link into the markdown and puts you back in the editor. (I don't know if we have good-enough support for keyboard-only users to choose that button. If yo... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How can we revitalize our community? This suggestion grew out of a comment discussion on another answer. I'm posting it separately so it can be voted on. As discussed in other answers, straight copies of content from Somewhere Else are almost certainly hurting SEO and, in volume, can give a negative impression -- we look like a copy... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: How can we revitalize our community? I wonder if segregating content that was imported and not further improved would help. Create a new category, maybe called "Archive", and move there any post that hasn't had any modifications post-import. This means those of us who want to preserve our bodies of work can, but people visiting the Q&... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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Syntax summaries use brackets for optional elements; how do I represent literal brackets in a way readers will understand? In our documentation of SQL functions and statements, we include a BNF-style syntax summary. As is conventional, we indicate optional elements in square brackets, like this: CREATE [IF NOT EXISTS] TABLE [schema.]table-name (column-definition[,...]) ... There's more to it, but that's the id... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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How can we revitalize our community? We've had low activity on our community for a while. Low activity means people visit less often, which means lower activity because they're not here asking and answering... iterate. We have ads active Somewhere Else, but without activity, people who follow them are unlikely to stick around. We s... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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A: Is there any benefit when writing out instructions to split it up into lots of little paragraphs, or is it better to leave it in one paragraph? Writing in fuller paragraphs feels like it creates better reading flow, as opposed to short choppy chunks of text, but that's a prose consideration. For instructions, the primary goal is to help the reader do all the necessary steps in applicable order. If lots of steps are combined in a single par... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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How can we format code examples so that they work on a range of devices? We use Madcap Flare to produce a large documentation set that contains many code examples (primarily SQL, but also C++, Java, and Python) and command-line operations. When the doc set was first planned, years ago, the people designing the layout assumed desktop browsers, as was the norm back then. ... (more) |
— | over 3 years ago |
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Hierarchical tags are now available We just got hierarchical tags. A tag can have one or more children, and when you search on a tag you can either search just that tag or also search its children. This gives us another way to organize content. This feature was proposed on the Judaism site; you can see more background there. (Thi... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Could a 13-year-old have morality to disagree with their family's unethical business practices, while those are the norm in their society? Setting aside your specific case, which I'm not qualified to comment on, I'll address your general question of a 13-year-old opposing family and the broader society's ethics. I have no particular expertise in history or sociology here; this is just what I've observed. Sure, this happens quite fre... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Would content at ebooks.se be in scope here? This answer is my opinion, not moderator/admin edict. Voting and feedback in comments still apply. Their site description says the site is for publishers and readers of ebooks. Anything about publishing ebooks is on-topic here (and was on Writing.SE). Reading is probably not unless it's stuff pu... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Are speaker tags always necessary when multiple people are in the conversation? Sometimes it doesn't matter who said what. In your example, where everyone has the same goals and is working together, it seems fine to leave most or all of them out -- the focus here is more on the group discussion than on individual speakers. This approach wouldn't work in cases where the speaker... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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What new data should we import from SE? When we set up this site we imported from SE as of the December data dump (the latest we had at the time). We didn't have a way to get the delta; the import code didn't use the API. We now have better data-import tools, and there's been a new data dump. We can, therefore, import stuff that was p... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead? I am documenting features on a web site. The audience is end users, who could be anywhere from seasoned Internet veterans to relatively new people who came for my site's content but aren't generally online for hours every day. People visit the web site on a variety of devices, from phones (mobile s... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: How can I make a transition from third person omniscient to first person less jarring for the reader? Like this answer, I don't think you need to use first-person to get into a character's head. I want to focus a little more on how to do that in omniscient third-person. An omniscient narrator can get into any character's head, as you said. You want to switch to first-person, maybe to focus ("we'... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Accepted Answer? We need to flesh this out, but the idea I have in my head, and that I recall discussing on the forum thread (which I haven't gone back and reread yet), is that in addition to votes we'll allow people to add reactions like "this worked" (and maybe a few others TBD). These would be public, unlike votes... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Sequence of Categories This is now configurable and I've moved Meta to the last position on this site. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Naming of Categories "Questions" seems better than "Q&A", yes. Not everything on the site will be questions. For example, a site can have a blog or a set of resources. Some sites will have sandboxes, which are proto-questions but not questions anybody should be answering yet. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Writing challenge #1: The great outdoors! She traced the delicate lines beneath the green leaf. The new growth felt fragile but tenacious, breaking free of winter's grasp, just like her. Winter? How did she know about winter? Ancestral memory, she guessed; seasons were new to her. She breathed in the scent of buds just opened into flo... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Let's restart writing challenges! Mithical has posted the first challenge: the great outdoors! Please join us there. I hope this'll be the first of many. (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Let's restart writing challenges! The writing challenges we've done in the past were fun and helped us flex our muscles, especially if they nudged us into new types of writing. Let's bring those back! I have created the Challenges category here. I've set the default license to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which in plain English means it's l... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: How do I deliver a historical plot reveal? If you have placed your clues and foreshadowing well, you can present the final clues and let the reader draw the conclusion. You're aiming for an "oh wait, what? Oh wow..." reaction as the reader draws a conclusion you never spelled out. This is risky; not all readers will draw the conclusion. ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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How do I deliver a historical plot reveal? This question was asked elsewhere by geneaux and is copied here in accordance with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license there. Right before the climax of my SciFi novel, there's a big reveal about who the bad guys really are and how they influenced the magic system -- throughout history. This reveal will ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Would I be able to have my characters play "Dungeons and Dragons" in my book? Think about all the fiction you've read that refers in passing to real companies, brands, sports teams, games, and so on. All of those things have trademarked names, yet you can have a character drink a can of Coke while watching the Red Sox play before heading out to Cinemax to see the latest Star ... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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Shall we showcase some of our fiction, poetry, and other work? You might have noticed the new "categories" feature on this site. I mean this: screenshot of categories tabs What are categories? Categories are types of content -- main Q&A and Meta are the two that all sites share, but the feature allows sites to build other things too -- blogs, question sa... (more) |
— | almost 4 years ago |
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A: Is there any popular wisdom on the word "seem"? Your example is first-person narration in the past tense. That is, your narrator is reporting events that previously happened. At the time of the events, the narrator thought the walls were moving -- no "seemed" about it. But at the time of the narration, the narrator (presumably) realizes that ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: How to prove that my blog is just not average? Assertions about quality from the creator of a work, whether it's a blog, a novel, a video, a podcast, or anything else, are not convincing because of the conflict of interest. Even if your work is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you saying it undermines the claim, because lots of people who ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Have we ground to a halt? I think your assessment is correct: we have lots of people here to answer, but we aren't seeing many new questions. Inertia is keeping the new questions mostly on SE. I, too, have been going through the lottery tab, casting votes and looking for things I can add useful answers to, but we need new q... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: There is no accept button? QPixel doesn't have an "accept" button, no. QPixel is a work in progress so it doesn't have everything SE has. QPixel is also a path toward Codidact, and Codidact won't have an "accept" button either. Why not? Which answer the asker of the question likes best isn't particularly significant ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Design changes are a-coming! Edit: fixed. The font face and size make posts too hard to read (and also, I'm now discovering, to compose). The current font face is vertically "squashed"; this is not the Arial or similar that we used to have. This face is harder to read, especially when combined with: The body text size ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Design changes are a-coming! Edit: fixed. Thanks for the update and the announcement. We seem to have lost our Writing-specific header graphic in the migration; it's been replaced by a QPixel logo. May we please have our graphic back? I see that Codidact Meta has its icon, so it's not a general problem. (Also, the fav... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Advice for indicating sources in tables A core principle with citation is: if you say it's from source X, it must be exactly what's in source X. Not a summary. Not a translation. Not a refactoring. By citing a source you are invoking that source's authority, in a sense; by adapting a work but citing it without noting the adaptation, yo... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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Ads for this community One of our community members, Paulster2, has created some ads and submitted them on SE sites where we've advertised in the past. These are "community promotion" ads, meaning the SE communities vote on them and that decides what ads are shown. This year the ads are similar but the URL is different. ... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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A: Documenting framework features and descriptions If you are documenting programming interfaces (APIs), look for a tool that generates documentation from comments in the code. This allows you to place the documentation right with the code, and the tool extracts the function interfaces from the code directly. This means there's one source of truth,... (more) |
— | about 4 years ago |
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How shall we handle our old (imported) content? When we created this site, I made the executive decision to import all our content from Stack Exchange instead of starting with a blank slate. I did that for a few reasons: - We have a lot of good content there, and we should continue to have ready access to, and curate, that content. - I felt... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |
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A: How to use professional jargon when writing fiction? Handling realistic jargon that your readers might not know is similar to the problem described in Using real words from a foreign culture feels like 'Calling a rabbit a "smeerp"', a question about fantasy language. In an answer there I pointed out that density is one problem; if every fifth word in ... (more) |
— | over 4 years ago |