Posts by Monica Cellio
I once saw someone in your situation address the problem by adding a (gendered) middle name to signatures. This could either be your real middle name if you have one, or a nickname that you're pre...
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...
Summary: I'm looking for a way for reviewers to comment collaboratively as close to "inline" as possible on a large HTML project. The problem in detail I work on a team that documents a large pro...
In the translation work I've seen for user-facing documentation, the translators stuck to the organization of the source but sometimes rephrased entire paragraphs, particularly if the source used i...
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...
If you live in one of the 175 countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention, then your work is automatically copyrighted when you create it. Registration is not required to have copyright...
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...
In your question you talk about writing "a scietific journal" (to track your progress), but then you talk about publishing in industry journals. Those are not the same thing -- and when you submit...
Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced site where anybody can contribute, just like this one. Wikipedia strives for verifiability and neutrality and has an active user community, but that doesn't mean that t...
Referring to history, as noted in other answers, is a good way. You don't have to depict the action to have it come up -- in conversation, when a character reads about something online, when a det...
Flash fiction gives you very little leeway. 100 words won't allow for extended plot, character development, scene-setting... really, it's enough for one scene. I've seen people pull off more in t...
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 general format for a reference citation in Harvard style is: Last name, First Initial. (Year published). Title. City: Publisher, Page(s). For a web site, this guide gives the following fo...
Use transitional phrases when you need to clarify or highlight a connection. Especially in technical writing (where concise is better), don't use them just to use them. In your example, the secon...
I don't have citations, but I've seen a couple approaches to this problem: "One possible application of (this work) would be to..." -- by casting it speculatively like that, using "would be", you...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
I'm at a different company now than I was when I asked this question, but the new one had the release-notes problem too. Here is how we solved it (at doc's instigation): When a bug is filed, if ...
I couldn't find explicit guidance in either the Chicago Manual of Style or the Microsoft Style Guide, but what I have observed (and would write naturally) is with commas: The maximum time perio...
In doing research, whether online or offline, there are two types of assertions you can encounter: supported and unsupported. (Just like here on Stack Exchange!) An unsupported claim isn't worth ...
We use a BNF style to convey syntax for SQL statements. For a (fictitious) example: CREATE PARSER [schema.]function [WITH [LANGUAGE='language'] [, MODE='[FENCED | UNFENCED]' [, STUF...
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...
I agree with this answer that developing characters will help you to write stories (which don't have to be full-blown books). Another approach you can take is to write very short stories or even j...
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 ...
