Posts by Monica Cellio
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-f...
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, sorr...
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...
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 p...
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 go...
We publish documentation online using HTML. For things like fixed parameter names and other code literals, we use <code> tags. My question is about styling these in tables. On our referenc...
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 ...
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 underst...
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 boa...
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 ...
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 docume...
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 Fl...
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 ...
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 aver...
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, inclu...
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...
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 ...
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...
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]...
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 a...
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 t...
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 pl...
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 orga...
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 ...
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 publ...