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Posts by Monica Cellio‭

318 posts
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Q&A Chopped sentences with too many conjunction, and repeating the subject again and again

For a screenplay, it is probably more important to be clear than to have excellent, flowing prose. (I'm not a screenwriter.) For the more-general case of descriptive prose, however, one approach ...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How do I write for webcomics?

A comic -- web or paper, cartoon strip or sophisticated graphic novel -- is a different medium from conventional written stories. The biggest difference is that it's hard to do exposition; those l...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How do I avoid tech/social errors in near-future fiction?

Not long ago I read a novel set in the near future (mid-21st century). My suspension of disbelief was totally fine with time travel, an implanted "universal translator" of sorts, major medical adv...

2 answers  ·  posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Is my serial-killer novel horror or crime?

I agree with SF and Lauren that who your POV character is affects this. But I'll take a different approach in answering this: when you talk about your project socially (e.g. with friends/family), ...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How can I prevent, or work around, unfortunate hyphenation in critical words?

With help from a coworker I was able to fix this by adding the following to the FO stylesheet: <xsl:template match="classname"> <fo:inline hyphenate="false"> <xsl:call-templat...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How can I prevent, or work around, unfortunate hyphenation in critical words?

In technical documentation, sometimes the tool's automatic hyphenation makes a bad break in the middle of a term, like the name of an environment variable or function. In these cases I would rathe...

1 answer  ·  posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A becoming better blogger when I write about diverse topics

In my experience there are two main types of blogs out there, topic-focused and person-focused. You're describing the latter. Person-focused blogs, which cover a range of topics and styles with t...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Punctuating Thoughts

"Hard and fast rules" come from the style guide you're following; all else is convention. I've seen both styles in fiction, so to decide which to use you can look at examples of similar type (genr...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Describing common hand gestures

In many cases you don't actually need, or necessarily want, to describe the gesture itself. It is often enough, or even preferable, to (a) convey that there was a gesture and (b) convey its meanin...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A API reference doc: best practices for describing opaque parameters?

The reference documentation for an application programming interface (API) is, in modern systems, usually generated from the code itself automatically. For example, for Java interfaces a typical t...

2 answers  ·  posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Does the following piece have too much dry narration (mundane tasks, moving about)?

I don't think the information is entirely unnecessary, but it's dry. Lauren gave a good answer about adding more feeling; in this answer I'll focus on another style issue. You have a lot of "she ...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Avoid blending Fantasy and Sci Fi

Why does apparent technology have to actually be technology? Can't it be either mundane or magical instead, even if in our world we would call it science or tech? Strength and speed can be enhanc...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A What do you do if you enjoy writing, but have no ideas?

Do you read? Study anything? Noodle around with puzzles or technical problems (in any field)? If so, try reacting to that. Write about something you've just learned and what further thoughts an...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How to represent dependencies in outlines

As Lauren said, the outline is a tool for your use, not a deliverable in its own right, so if you deviate from it, that's ok. You asked how to track these dependencies in an outline. A techniqu...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Background speech with foreground dialogue

I saw an effective example of this in 1634: The Baltic War (David Weber & Eric Flint) recently. The factors that made it work were: The background speech was in italics (as you've done here)...

posted 10y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Ways to improve your writing skills

In addition to reading (as suggested by others), practice writing in contexts that are already available to you. (Starting a blog is good too, but if you can't build a reader base that can be disc...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How should I introduce new and complex technologies or tools?

Lauren's and SF's answers give good advice for dealing with the necessary explanation. My additional advice is: make sure it's really necessary. Driving a car is a pretty complex task (ask anyone...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Getting details of a past century right

Historical re-enactors share your problem. Here are some of the things we do: Read history books, sure, but sometimes it's the museum catalogs that show everything from art to architecture to eve...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  edited 3y ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Q&A How should we go from Stack Exchange Q/A to publishable PDF with the least hassle?

We have learned through experimentation that a new-enough version of Microsoft Word (we tested with 2010) supports format-preserving cut-and-paste from Stack Exchange posts. We drew up some format...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How should we go from Stack Exchange Q/A to publishable PDF with the least hassle?

Over on another site we're talking about taking some of our content (on a particular theme) and re-packaging it as a printable PDF. (The primary use case is paper.) This wouldn't be a straight du...

2 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Is there any standardized definition of a "Mary Sue"?

A "Mary Sue" is a character who represents a highly-idealized version of the author (usually). This is the sort of character who, as needed, can perform brain surgery with one hand on a turbulent ...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How can I express this fragment more clearly and concisely?

Try something like this: This application is for users of (ESP) who need to understand its results quickly and easily. (Product) takes the metrics compiled by (ESP) and presents them in a way ...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A What is the role of editors in news media today?

Back when rocks were soft and the world wide web hadn't yet been invented, I worked on a college newspaper that, I was told, followed the same patterns as professional papers. (That is, the skills...

0 answers  ·  posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A Should the transition sentence be placed in the end of the current section, or at the beginning of next section?

It depends on the context. In the example in this question, cars are being presented as connected to buses somehow, so it makes sense to have this kind of segue. However, in a chapter with a bunc...

posted 11y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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Q&A How to write time duration correctly

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...

posted 6y ago by Monica Cellio‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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