Posts by Monica Cellio
I've changed teams (and companies) since asking this question years ago, and the doc set is even larger on my current team. Here's how we manage changes that affect parts of the documentation with...
We did not find an off-the-shelf solution to this and built our own. I'm not the author and can't release the code, but here is an overview of the approach. Flare versions from 2016 onward support...
I think this would particularly help in this "new site, imported content" stage. There are a lot of questions and answers that are old and valuable. They all started here at score 0 (that's by de...
I was hoping that our code of conduct could be something closer to the "be nice" model, something like this: Be respectful and polite. Presume everyone else is doing so, too. Be open to construct...
This might be related to this issue, which is sort of the reverse of the one I'm reporting now. According to the front page, ArtOfCode did something on this question an hour ago (as I write this)....
The first step is to use different styling for the telepathic parts, as suggested in the answer by Evil Sparrow. I recommend against using italics because italics are often used for inner dialogue...
I needed to include screenshots in this question but didn't see a way to add them directly. I uploaded those to imgur so I could post, but that's not the ideal solution. (You'll see why if you lo...
According to the question list, this question was last active 8 hours ago as I write this: However, I answered it 2 hours ago as shown in the history on my answer: Is this list heavily cached...
I endorse Evil Sparrow's answer. If, however you must lead with the old man for some reason, you can return from the room back to him with a paragraph break. Paragraph breaks are (small) disconti...
I've realized in using this site how dependent I am on the information on the SE question list about who and what bumped a post. "Answered by" + name is a valuable "hey, go read this!" clue, as do...
In your first example, all three of your sentences focus on the effect. Instead, mix in some descriptions of the cause. Instead of: You have a feeling of immense dread as you take in the macabr...
Welcome to a new home for the Writing community. Please use it, report problems and make requests on Meta, and collect your thoughts about what we need to support our community. This site is runn...
Print publications that are no longer in print are (were) still print publications. You would therefore cite them the same way you would any other newspaper article from a still-extant paper. (Ci...
"Concise" doesn't mean "very short"; it means "no more verbose than it needs to be". In your case, you have needs that establish a minimum length. Trying to fight against that will only lead to f...
A villain has intention -- it's out to cause some outcome, foil the main character (if it's personal), and generally advance its own agenda. The world, on the other hand, just is, barring worlds wi...
Show his religious practices more and his explicit beliefs less. What does a devout Catholic do? Probably he doesn't spend all day talking about his beliefs; instead he lives them. He tithes. H...
The Magic 2.0 series by Scott Meyer has this situation with a core character (so it's not a passing situation). The narrator and the characters identify the two as Brit the Elder and Brit the Youn...
A nomination post is basically a sales pitch, packed into 1200 characters. You need to persuade readers that you are or might be a good choice in a few hundred words (give or take). So a nominati...
The reader needs a connection when transitioning into the flashback. That transition can be either external or internal. By external, I mean introducing the flashback. In this case, the reader kn...
IDE-like tools exist for writers. Scrivener is a powerful general-purpose tool (also with questions here). Madcap Flare, aimed at technical writers, has good support for updating links, defining "s...
If you live in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention (most countries are), then your work is copyrighted as soon as you create it, regardless of whether you go through any registrat...
Base parts of the setting on real world cultures or locations. Unless you have near-infinite time to do your worldbuilding, you're probably going to keep coming back to our world. So start th...
This is a challenging specialization to capture in a job title, which is why my LinkedIn tagline says "speaker to programmers". But that doesn't work as a job title at any but the edgiest startups...
Writing a full translation will approximately double the time you spend creating each post, so as other answers have said, you'll need to consider the cost versus benefit. However, thee's another ...
Our documentation set includes some diagrams where text is integral and can't be handled in callouts, like flowcharts and entity relationship diagrams. Our documentation is translated, so these di...
