Posts by Monica Cellio
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 it has an annoying property: if you happen to have the shift key down when you type a space, it inserts a non-breaking space ( ). Our docume...
I agree with Lauren Ipsum's answer. Some additional points: The paragraph you posted for the cover letter talks about what you want to do, but you've actually done this. Call that out; lots of p...
I do something similar to your ASCII implementation, but instead of an ASCII block I use compact bulleted lists (with sub-lists). File/directory names are still styled as they would be in running ...
The ideas in this excerpt grab me. We have a first-person narrator who's dead; how does that work? This seems to have involved some sort of deal to help the narrator's son, and there seem to be a...
My experience is in software documentation (particularly programming interfaces), so I'll answer from that perspective. I think these principles are pretty general, but I've never written manuals ...
For documentation that will be published outside your organization, it is usually important to follow a style guide (pretty much any one) so that all the documentation reads with one "voice" even t...
My background: wanted to be a programmer, entered a math program in college (because that was how you got to CS), loved the CS but hated the math, switched to technical writing and took the CS from...
One resource is Techwr-l, a large, long-running mailing list and web forum. You can't just post job ads to the mailing list, but they accept ads/sponsorships. I've never advertised there so I don...
You have six sentences' worth of text in three conjoined sentences. Not all of the pairings are necessary and some might not be "correct"; for example, you could just as easily conjoin the questio...
The up-hill battle you face is that there's a lot of material out there and publishers can afford to be choosy. Based on observation only (I haven't tried to get essay collections published nor am...
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...
I think it's three things. First, the accessible writing style, with its informal language that matches how regular people think and talk, is helpful but not sufficient. Second, the character's a...
For our SDK, we generate individual documents (PDFs) and one big HTML doc set (CHM file) from the same Docbook source. Each book has an index, and the HTML version has an integrated index that is ...
The challenge with publishing these days, especially with the great supply of e-books, is getting people to look at your stuff among all the competition. There's so much to choose from; if I've ne...
Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these ...
Books compiling previously-published articles are not new. The usual challenges there are selecting and organizing your material and editing it for a different audience. Compiling material that i...
Our ~1500-page documentation set contains numerous screen shots and related graphics (schematics, flow diagrams, etc). Sometimes the user interface changes and we have to update all the affected g...
Either of those is fine ("&" is just another way to write "and") and will be understood. Another formulation you'll sometimes see is "Aug 4-5, 2011", but this is better for things that are con...
It would be bad style to publish documentation that did that, but since a wiki is designed to be edited by many people who will each have their own quirks and don't usually consult house style guid...
There is no rule that you have to produce an equal volume of words in order for your correspondent to appreciate you. In fact, if you quote every sentence individually, inserting "I agree" or "goo...
I largely agree with this answer, to which I add: Order of perception by your POV character fits nicely into all the other stuff that you're telling through that POV, so it's a good place to star...
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 ...
