Activity for Monica Cellio
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How specific should I be when outlining the plot? It's tempting to include all this information that you already know, so what's the harm? The harm, as you indicate in your question, is that the outline no longer serves as a good gauge of your progress through the work. What is the purpose of the outline? If your publisher requires it then follow y... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How to represent dependencies in outlines As Lauren said, the outline is a tool for your use, not a deliverable in its own right, so if you deviate from it, that's ok. You asked how to track these dependencies in an outline. A technique I have used is to diagram my outline, using arrows to point from an entry to each one that it depends on.... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Should the transition sentence be placed in the end of the current section, or at the beginning of next section? It depends on the context. In the example in this question, cars are being presented as connected to buses somehow, so it makes sense to have this kind of segue. However, in a chapter with a bunch of stand-alone sections, it doesn't. If the same chapter is talking about buses, cars, trains, planes, ... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Avoid blending Fantasy and Sci Fi Why does apparent technology have to actually be technology? Can't it be either mundane or magical instead, even if in our world we would call it science or tech? Strength and speed can be enhanced through medicine (and its cousin, magical potions). Hoverboards with mechanical motors/propellors/jet-... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: How to better describe "jet-black (pitch-black) darkness"? Instead of a looking for a single expression, consider the cases individually. If you can show us that it's black (pitch- or otherwise), you won't need to tell us. Consider: > Pine resin cloaked the dense forest in darkness... > > I also recalled one moonless 1 night Sometimes you really do just n... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: What is the best way to learn technical writing? My background: wanted to be a programmer, entered a math program in college (because that was how you got to CS), loved the CS but hated the math, switched to technical writing and took the CS from there, and ended up doing a mix of programming, tech writing, and software design for the next (cough) ... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: What do you do if you enjoy writing, but have no ideas? Do you read? Study anything? Noodle around with puzzles or technical problems (in any field)? If so, try reacting to that. Write about something you've just learned and what further thoughts and questions it prompts. Write about something you've just read -- not necessarily a review, but perhaps the... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Chopped sentences with too many conjunction, and repeating the subject again and again For a screenplay, it is probably more important to be clear than to have excellent, flowing prose. (I'm not a screenwriter.) For the more-general case of descriptive prose, however, one approach is to convert "they are" verbal clauses to adjectival clauses. Instead of: > Hundreds of people are stand... (more) |
— | almost 11 years ago |
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A: Ways to improve your writing skills In addition to reading (as suggested by others), practice writing in contexts that are already available to you. (Starting a blog is good too, but if you can't build a reader base that can be discouraging.) You're a CS major; that presumably means you are designing and implementing software. There is... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: How should I introduce new and complex technologies or tools? Lauren's and SF's answers give good advice for dealing with the necessary explanation. My additional advice is: make sure it's really necessary. Driving a car is a pretty complex task (ask anyone who's taught a teenager :-) ), and there are cases where it might be important to describe in detail the... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: How can I consistently distinguish among tables, fields, and records in a database? Does the publication in question have relevant style guidelines? (I'm assuming not or you wouldn't be asking here.) In your proposed solution, you are using both formatting and (initial) explicit labeling to convey information: "the trees table" rather than just " trees", for instance. This is good;... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: Getting details of a past century right Historical re-enactors share your problem. Here are some of the things we do: - Read history books, sure, but sometimes it's the museum catalogs that show everything from art to architecture to everyday kitchenware that really help. Then ask yourself what it would be like to live in a building li... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: How should we go from Stack Exchange Q/A to publishable PDF with the least hassle? We have learned through experimentation that a new-enough version of Microsoft Word (we tested with 2010) supports format-preserving cut-and-paste from Stack Exchange posts. We drew up some formatting guidelines to get the content into shape (e.g. de-linkifying, since this is for paper). This still i... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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How should we go from Stack Exchange Q/A to publishable PDF with the least hassle? Over on another site we're talking about taking some of our content (on a particular theme) and re-packaging it as a printable PDF. (The primary use case is paper.) This wouldn't be a straight dump of the original posts; sometimes you want to edit some for a different audience, links don't work, and ... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: Is there any standardized definition of a "Mary Sue"? A "Mary Sue" is a character who represents a highly-idealized version of the author (usually). This is the sort of character who, as needed, can perform brain surgery with one hand on a turbulent jet that she's piloting absent-mindedly while working on a cure for cancer -- that sort of thing. Wikiped... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: How can I express this fragment more clearly and concisely? Try something like this: > This application is for users of (ESP) who need to understand its results quickly and easily. (Product) takes the metrics compiled by (ESP) and presents them in a way that makes troubleshooting and documentation easier. (Product) produces reports for (business function A),... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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What is the role of editors in news media today? Back when rocks were soft and the world wide web hadn't yet been invented, I worked on a college newspaper that, I was told, followed the same patterns as professional papers. (That is, the skills we learned doing this would transfer.) Between the journalist's story submission and the print copy stoo... (more) |
— | about 11 years ago |
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A: How do I approach writing an autobiography? Unless you are near (what you think is) the end of your life, you don't have enough data yet to know what will ultimately be the best organization. So don't try to create an outline; just start writing pieces. Chronological seems logical but might not be very engaging. Is reading a day-by-day (or we... (more) |
— | over 11 years ago |
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A: Writing a programming book: how to present directory structures I do something similar to your ASCII implementation, but instead of an ASCII block I use compact bulleted lists (with sub-lists). File/directory names are still styled as they would be in running text. In addition to conveying the structure, this also gives me a handy place to add explanations where ... (more) |
— | almost 12 years ago |
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A: How well would this beginning sell the book to readers? Not necessarily for money The ideas in this excerpt grab me. We have a first-person narrator who's dead; how does that work? This seems to have involved some sort of deal to help the narrator's son, and there seem to be alternate timelines or worlds involved. This makes me curious and it does not feel too information-intensiv... (more) |
— | almost 12 years ago |
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A: How can you write less to say more? My experience is in software documentation (particularly programming interfaces), so I'll answer from that perspective. I think these principles are pretty general, but I've never written manuals for, say, airplane repair. Generally, you want your documentation to say all and only what is needed for... (more) |
— | almost 12 years ago |
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A: Should I put colons with second-level titles? First off, if you're writing for the government they might have a format they expect, so if so and it says something on this point, it wins. Otherwise, I would not use colons in any of your titles or paragraphs. The colon's job is to introduce what follows (e.g. in a list), but a title/subtitle/subs... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Is it overkill to follow style-guides for technical writing? For documentation that will be published outside your organization, it is usually important to follow a style guide (pretty much any one) so that all the documentation reads with one "voice" even though it was written by a bunch of different people. As noted by Lauren Ipsum, you don't read the style ... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Where to find authors for highly technical articles? One resource is Techwr-l, a large, long-running mailing list and web forum. You can't just post job ads to the mailing list, but they accept ads/sponsorships. I've never advertised there so I don't know how well it works, but you could ask them about success rates. You could also look into the Socie... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Avoiding "and" as a sentence structure You have six sentences' worth of text in three conjoined sentences. Not all of the pairings are necessary and some might not be "correct"; for example, you could just as easily conjoin the question and the answer, which are currently part of two different sentences. One way to attack this problem is... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: How to write a book for a given reading level? One approach would be to record your story-telling sessions, particularly in a way that captures his reactions. You could then review those recordings to see what worked and what didn't (e.g. you had to repeat something in a different way). Reading comprehension is different from aural comprehension,... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: How can I make a collection of essays / arguments more attractive to publishers? The up-hill battle you face is that there's a lot of material out there and publishers can afford to be choosy. Based on observation only (I haven't tried to get essay collections published nor am I a publisher, but I've watched others pursue this), publishers are looking for a unifying theme that ca... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Habits and routines for my first tech writing job I'm answering this as a technical writer but I don't have translation experience so can't address any aspects specific to that. Many of the habits that (I hope) you already have as a software developer apply equally to technical writing: - Design first: figure out how you will structure the documen... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Explaining that experience is far greater than official job title implies I agree with Lauren Ipsum's answer. Some additional points: The paragraph you posted for the cover letter talks about what you want to do, but you've actually done this. Call that out; lots of people have aspirations, but you've got solid experience. Consider working in something like the following:... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: Slow openings: What is it about this Neil Gaiman opening that pulls the reader in? I think it's three things. First, the accessible writing style, with its informal language that matches how regular people think and talk, is helpful but not sufficient. Second, the character's acceptance of the situation, which he appears to have accepted from the beginning, is unusual; we expect co... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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Best practices for maintaining documented code examples? A good SDK (software development kit) includes plenty of well-documented examples. It also includes good tutorials and developer guides, which introduce concepts in logical progressions, typically showing only the relevant excerpts from the sample code. (Nobody wants to see a 200-line program inline ... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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How do you build good per-book *and* global indexes? For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an index, and the HTML version has an integrated index that is the union of all the individual entries. We have been focusing on the individual books in crafting our i... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: What marketing techniques are effective for short story eBook collections? The challenge with publishing these days, especially with the great supply of e-books, is getting people to look at your stuff among all the competition. There's so much to choose from; if I've never heard of you, what will get me to buy? Short stories seem to this consumer to have a big advantage: y... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: How do you avoid the problem of a collaborative work having separate voices? For fiction that can accommodate different POVs, dividing those up per author not only addresses this problem but can be a feature. For cases where you want a unified voice, if you can't get a tough editor like Lauren Ipsum suggested, try having the authors edit each other's sections. Or, as noted... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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How do you track dependencies for your co-authors? I and one or more co-authors, sometimes geographically distributed, are working on a set of related documents. Sometimes I will make a change in my part that affects someone else's part; this could be anything from changing a name to adding a new concept (that later parts should then use or reference... (more) |
— | about 12 years ago |
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A: LaTex vs. Word vs. etc Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these tools export XML or SGML.) The reasons include: - Decoupling from editors. You can use your favorite too... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: How can I revise these sentences to be more correct while still keeping the effect? The second sentence feels grammatically incorrect because it's not a sentence; it's two fragments joined by a semicolon. That doesn't make it wrong, but that's probably why you're reacting that way. If you want to keep the fragment style, I would tweak it thus: > Or perhaps not despite -- perhaps b... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: How to write about things which depend on each other There are two general approaches, depending on the amount of detail you need from the "other" concept. If you don't need a lot, write about subject A, and when the first interaction with B hits add a parenthetical sentence, call-out note, or footnote (depending on your style guide) describing the ot... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: What are the challenges of converting blog content to a publishable work? Books compiling previously-published articles are not new. The usual challenges there are selecting and organizing your material and editing it for a different audience. Compiling material that is still readily available (blog posts) adds one more challenge: how do you induce people to pay for what t... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable for a book to not have a dominant lead character? Movies and television shows can have ensemble casts; why not books? I've seen this in SF/fantasy books where the ensemble is the members of an adventuring party, the crew of a ship, etc; often there are 3-6 core characters. The novel 1632 (and successors) has many more important characters than I'm ... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: How can I express this more clearly or concisely? Edited based on comments: Given the following function declaration: > f\get\vend\code(v\nut\id varchar2) return varchar2; I would write the description as follows: > This function takes a nut ID (NUT\ID) and returns the vendor's seller code (WINGNUT\SELLER\CODE) for this form. If NUT\ID is not se... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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How can I manage screen shots and other graphics for maintenance? Our 1500-page documentation set contains numerous screen shots and related graphics (schematics, flow diagrams, etc). Sometimes the user interface changes and we have to update all the affected graphics. The affected graphics are not necesarily all in one book; they can be spread across several. In s... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: What's the proper etiquette/format for updating a blog post? For inconsequential changes you can just edit it. For anything substantial ("I meant to say I disagree with..."), I've often seen an explicit notation: "Edited to add: ..." "Edit: ...", or the like. If there have been relevant comments, you can include a timestamp for the edit so people will see it w... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: Does a technical writer need a technical background? I am an experienced technical writer specializing in API documentation. In my experience, in order to be successful a technical writer needs enough technical aptitude to (1) understand the users' needs and (2) probe the subject-matter experts (SMEs). If all you're going to do is parrot what the SMEs ... (more) |
— | over 12 years ago |
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A: Breaking Into Technical Writing - Where to Start (from a programming background) There are different kinds of technical writing, differing in the "technical" part. The logical place for you to start, coming from a programming background like I did, would be with programmer-facing documentation: APIs, SDKs, and the tutorials and guides that go with them. If any of your current (p... (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |
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A: What is the proper way to write a date containing two days in a row? Either of those is fine ("&" is just another way to write "and") and will be understood. Another formulation you'll sometimes see is "Aug 4-5, 2011", but this is better for things that are continuous, like a convention. I assume your presentation will be in two parts, one on Aug 4 and the other on Au... (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable to mix how you address the reader in an instructional Wiki? It would be bad style to publish documentation that did that, but since a wiki is designed to be edited by many people who will each have their own quirks and don't usually consult house style guides, doing this on a wiki probably won't raise eyebrows. That said, you should go back and change those ... (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |
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A: When I'm replying to emails, what's the best way to acknowledge that I appreciated each point of someone's email? There is no rule that you have to produce an equal volume of words in order for your correspondent to appreciate you. In fact, if you quote every sentence individually, inserting "I agree" or "good point" after each, that's going to lower people's impression of you -- it's a "me, too" reply, only wor... (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |
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A: What style suggestions are common for which words are used in hyperlinks? A link to the name is generally expected to link to the person, not to an article. I generally agree with @Craig Sefton, except that I would make "claims that pigs can fly" the link and not just "pigs can fly". It's a claim (by John Q), not a fact; "pigs can fly" could link to, say, a wikipedia page... (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |
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A: Least possible editing effort if a text is for multiple media? Any single-sourcing scheme is going to require some up-front setup in exchange for easier generation of multiple formats later. This Wikipedia page provides a starting point for process and tools. (more) |
— | almost 13 years ago |