Posts by Monica Cellio
I was the editor of my university paper back in the day. Chris Sunami's answer is right; university newspapers are produced by amateurs, people learning the trade (who might not even be taking jou...
If you don't provide a hint, then readers will know only that somebody requested a meeting and that's considered an emergency. If you want to convey something about the nature of the organization ...
You avoid it by showing us a whole, three-dimensional character with attendant complexity. Doing great things is not about one thing. Your character has a mix of traits, talents, interests, incli...
The first step is to work out some style guidelines among yourselves. Agree on what style you want the finished product to follow. Because this is a project among friends rather than, say, a corp...
I sometimes post photos on my blog, like when I'm blogging about food. I've been shrinking the huge pictures my phone takes down to a size that fits more reasonably in a browser window -- my brows...
I've got nothing on shadowing (I suspect that's a very hard sell), but for asking questions, there are two (non-exclusive) approaches that I've seen and occasionally been part of (on both sides). ...
How you structure a code review depends on the tools you're using and the level of scrutiny that was requested. Instead of giving you an exact template, therefore, I'll address the different types...
This answer provides a lot of good information. I want to augment it, not compete with it. Over time, many organizations develop templates for various documents (design, functional spec, test pla...
One way to keep it from taking over your story is to make it unexceptional. Quite literally. Kem is nonbinary. If Kem, other characters, and the narrator don't make a big deal out of that, don't...
You can look for other ways to identify the characters. For example: The tall figure stood in the corner, towering over the unmoving skinny figure in the chair beside it. It moved away from th...
The MLA doesn't have a definitive statement on this. In an entry about citing speech bubbles from comics they show an example that includes only the author, but the book itself doesn't credit an a...
I've found that the main key to unfamiliar words -- and this applies to jargon in technical writing as much as it does to foreign or made-up words in fiction -- is density. The example in the XKCD...
In addition to grouping steps that must be done together and teaching troubleshooting, give the user a way to recover -- because sometimes the user isn't going to figure it out and is going to bail...
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.
What you write depends on your audience. API reference documentation -- the output of tool- like Doxygen -- is usually for the users of that API. Such externally-facing documentation focuses on t...
I've worked on a few doc sets like that. While API reference documentation is one case where you see this problem, the problem occurs at the "module" level too. Your question is about microservic...
I've done it both ways, and have found that a hybrid approach ends up working best. Doing it at the end means you can focus just on indexing (not writing). You're more likely to be consistent in ...
I work (with a team) on a large documentation set for a complex software product. We publish HTML and have built-in search (plus, of course, there's Google). The doc set has a glossary, which pre...
IEEE uses a style that is common for journal articles and academic works. The citation is the full "description" of the work -- author, title, date, publication, etc. The document you linked desc...
One way to convey time is with signposts: She buried her head in the pillow as she smacked the alarm clock for the third time. He fumbled with his key in the lock, glowering at the burnt-o...
The convention in scientific writing, at least in the hard sciences, is to avoid "I" even for single-author papers. I suspect (but can't prove) that this is why you see so much passive voice in su...
Speculative stories about God, or gods, can show up in the realm of speculative fiction, science fiction, or fantasy. Consider the following examples: Some of the stories in Wandering Stars, ed....
You can cast it as an early report on your beta launch, or as a preview of your forthcoming launch. Assuming that you're restricting it now so you can work the kinks out before spreading more wide...
"Private" doesn't mean just one recipient; it just means "not public". When you throw a by-invitation party in your home it's a private affair even if there are 50 people there. Email is the same...
It depends, but probably you want the distributed approach where the chapter on X tells you everything you need to know about X, even if some of that is only relevant if you're using feature Y. Ho...
