Activity for Monica Cellio
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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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 tha... (more) |
— | over 14 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 doc... (more) |
— | over 14 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 follow... (more) |
— | over 14 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 expec... (more) |
— | over 14 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 inl... (more) |
— | over 14 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 o... (more) |
— | over 14 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 advantag... (more) |
— | over 14 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 n... (more) |
— | over 14 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 refer... (more) |
— | over 14 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... (more) |
— | over 14 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 -- perha... (more) |
— | over 14 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 th... (more) |
— | over 14 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 wh... (more) |
— | almost 15 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 ... (more) |
— | about 15 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 no... (more) |
— | about 15 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. ... (more) |
— | about 15 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 ... (more) |
— | about 15 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 S... (more) |
— | about 15 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 curren... (more) |
— | about 15 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 o... (more) |
— | about 15 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 th... (more) |
— | about 15 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... (more) |
— | about 15 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 ... (more) |
— | over 15 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) |
— | over 15 years ago |
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A: Technical Writing Software As Viktor said, FrameMaker is probably the best widely-used tool for doing what you're trying to do. Another (Windows-only) tool that I'm using now is Madcap Flare, but it's pretty pricy. Other considerations: DocBook is a spec, not a tool (as Viktor said). It is XML, so you can use any XML edi... (more) |
— | over 15 years ago |