Posts by Monica Cellio
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)...
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...
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), ...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
Unless you are near (what you think is) the end of your life, you don't have enough data yet to know what will ultimately be the best organization. So don't try to create an outline; just start wr...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
