Posts by Monica Cellio
My story (novella?) starts in media res, in the middle of the conflict that will set the rest of the story in motion. Currently I am "scene-cutting" between that event and some earlier events that...
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...
Setups are most rewarding when the reader realizes after the fact that that detail was important but doesn't figure it out too early (i.e. it's not more obvious than you wanted it to be). If a rea...
Have a lighter "B" plot. Yes, your main character is getting deeper and deeper into a dark place because of the struggle with the evil overlord -- and in the midst of it all she also finds herself...
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...
Only cite sources you've actually seen. In this case, it sounds like you have a secondary source (your link) that quotes from and does not cite a primary source. All you can say with certainty is...
The heartlessness you describe is "externally facing" -- the actions he takes and the way he interacts with others. That doesn't mean there's no heart at all in there; it just means he doesn't all...
In many (most?) companies you do not need a degree or certificate; what you need is demonstrated skill. Technical writing is not a super-common degree to begin with; many technical writers have de...
It sounds like you want to introduce your readers to one of your inspirations (since you said this person is connected to one of the characters in your book). This is sometimes done in a preface, ...
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...
"E.g." is an abbreviation for the Latin "exempli gratia", which means "for example". The abbreviation is fairly common in "advanced" writing, like theses, in my experience. However, it's an other...
As noted in this answer, you do need to be mindful that for a user guide your reader's goal is information, while for a rulebook it can also be entertainment. If the entertainment gets in the way ...
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...
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. In other words, your main character probably doesn't see himself as a terrorist, so a first-person or close third-person story focusing on tha...
This is a supplement to this answer. Readers, especially technical readers, notice small variations and especially inconsistencies. If you talk about "removing" a resource in one place and "delet...
Dialect used in dialogue can work well, especially when the writer is fluent. (Writers who aren't fluent in the dialect they're trying to use can make a mess of it.) Dialect is another aspect of ...
The Microsoft Style Guide says it depends on usage: In general, use imperative constructions in conceptual or informational topics for both the title and the headings. Describe what the user wa...
There are different types of examples and they serve different purposes. One type is the quick-start example that this answer describes: a complete, but small, runnable example packaged in a form ...
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...
Release notes should describe what changed as seen by the users. That doesn't necessarily mean "all the gory technical details", though; as with other technical writing, you want to tell the user ...
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...
As this answer points out, name changes aren't limited to transgender people. A practice I've seen often is to include both names when clarification is necessary. For example, I'd adjust the exam...
