Posts by Monica Cellio
The nice thing about websites is that there can be more than one. Publishers, being publishers, want to promote their books, which will of course include on the web, but that doesn't mean you can'...
I can't cite a style guide for this, only offer both observation and logic. Sanjay isn't a real person either, but you capitalized his name like you do for real people. That felt completely natur...
The quotation marks themselves provide signal. By then tying the line of dialogue to an action in the same paragraph, it's clear that Kiyoshi is speaking. If anybody else were doing the speaking ...
It depends. How many of them are there? An RLC circuit is composed of a resistor, an inductor, and a capacitor elements. This means that an RLC circuit has exactly one of each of these three...
As another answer noted, landing pages are of limited utility -- you need them, but you shouldn't assume people will start there. It sounds like your modules are all inter-related, even if one cus...
If the figure were in another published work, you would cite it the same way you would if it were somebody else's work. Citing yourself is done when applicable; that's not an error. You indicated...
The letter is a primary source, as you already know. This is the actual artifact, the letter the young woman received from NASA. The article about the history of these events is a secondary sourc...
It depends on who your readers are and what they are trying to do with the information. Documentation about the same product could have very different levels/types of detail depending on whether y...
The people in your story might not know anything about Earth, but your readers do. You can show lighter gravity by describing things that couldn't happen on Earth -- a person out for a jog boundin...
The questions you need to answer are: What story do I want to tell? What elements do I need to have available to tell it? If you want to tell your backstory, and it stands alone, then you ha...
You don't need to -- and shouldn't try to -- explain every detail of every bit of background you've come up with. If your writing says "I had to do lots of research to write this so I'm going to ...
"Both" can act as emphasis when one of the two is unexpected. In this usage, the unexpected one is placed second. For example, consider the difference between: Tom and his manager thought the...
As others have said, most fantasy is set in a different environment, where the non-English-speaking inhabitants have different cultural and linguistic norms. So it's only natural to want to convey...
You haven't specified any preferences for format (source or output), and that's going to be relevant. If it's up to you, for your source I recommend a text (not binary-format) markup language -- H...
We solved this by adding overview files in Markdown format into the source tree and making one small configuration change. In Doxyfile, we set GENERATE_TREEVIEW to yes. This enables the sidebar t...
We use doxygen to generate API (reference) documentation for our code. We have a small Java API and a large C++ API. The usual tool of choice for Java APIs is Javadoc, but doxygen can do both and...
It sounds like you're describing an ensemble cast, where there are several key characters but no single main character. While the page I linked to talks about TV/movies, the same applies to writte...
My team uses MadCap Flare to produce a large body of documentation (thousands of topics). The source is "Flare HTML", HTML with some Flare additions (for variables, admonitions, snippets, and so o...
In many books you'll see an author's note at the beginning (or sometimes end) in which the author thanks various people for their help -- beta readers, members of a writing circle, editors, advisor...
The style I see most often in technical writing is that UI labels, like the names of menus, are bold: From the File menu, choose Save. Click the Submit button. Variable text is usually i...
You are concerned that a document containing a recent, past date (like from last year) will make readers think your document is out of date. One way to address that is to use dates that are obviou...
Short phrases like that can't usually be copyrighted. The link is from the US government, but I believe it to be the same for most of the Berne Convention countries. Of course you should consult ...
Rule #1 in technical documentation is: don't mislead the reader. If the command or function name begins with a lowercase letter, capitalizing it is an error -- it's not "Cat" but "cat". The Micro...
The problem you're having is in attaching the final clause: NAME is...that helps...by rating...and helps... . When the reader gets to the "and" he's expecting it to bind to the "by" -- NAME h...
One way to show passage of time is by referring to time-based events. Over the course of a year you can use seasons for this; if we see your characters walking through the snow, and next see them ...
