Posts by Monica Cellio
Edit: fixed. The font face and size make posts too hard to read (and also, I'm now discovering, to compose). The current font face is vertically "squashed"; this is not the Arial or similar that ...
This was a tricky one. That Q&A page had an answer with a pending suggested edit from a user who was later deleted. We had an unsafe check there (didn't account for nil), and it broke the pag...
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...
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...
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 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...
When we set up this site we imported from SE as of the December data dump (the latest we had at the time). We didn't have a way to get the delta; the import code didn't use the API. We now have b...
"Questions" seems better than "Q&A", yes. Not everything on the site will be questions. For example, a site can have a blog or a set of resources. Some sites will have sandboxes, which are p...
Mithical has posted the first challenge: the great outdoors! Please join us there. I hope this'll be the first of many.
If you have placed your clues and foreshadowing well, you can present the final clues and let the reader draw the conclusion. You're aiming for an "oh wait, what? Oh wow..." reaction as the reade...
This question was asked elsewhere by geneaux and is copied here in accordance with the CC BY-SA 4.0 license there. Right before the climax of my SciFi novel, there's a big reveal about who the b...
Think about all the fiction you've read that refers in passing to real companies, brands, sports teams, games, and so on. All of those things have trademarked names, yet you can have a character d...
Your example is first-person narration in the past tense. That is, your narrator is reporting events that previously happened. At the time of the events, the narrator thought the walls were movin...
A general principle of citation is: only cite what you actually used. You haven't seen the original work, so don't cite it based on someone else's quote. What if the quote you're working from is ...
If you are documenting programming interfaces (APIs), look for a tool that generates documentation from comments in the code. This allows you to place the documentation right with the code, and th...
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...
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...
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...
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 this sort of thing as part of evaluating technologies. It's usually cast as an evaluation, covering both benefits and weaknesses, rather than just weaknesses. I suggest getting clarificat...
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 ...
