Posts by Monica Cellio
This XKCD strip shows a visualization approach for tracking character interactions -- who's with whom when. It works pretty well even with a complex plot with many characters (one of the examples ...
This depends in part on the type of writing (technical reference manual? novel with illustrations? etc) and how people will read it (printed book? online?). If a reader follows a reasonable path1 ...
You don't need a publishing house for that (and anyway your intended distribution is too low for such companies to be interested). You just want to self-publish your work. When I self-published a...
DITA is an XML format, so any editor or IDE that supports XML will work for you. Options with good XML support range from Eclipse (free) to Oxygen and Epic (several hundred dollars per seat). Of ...
If it's important enough to mention the hour then it's important enough to be clear which one you mean, but using "AM" and "PM" in fiction may not be the best way. If the scene already makes it cl...
There are two reasons. First, as described in this answer, news articles are written as an inverted pyramid and are designed to be cut at any paragraph break and still work. In the late stages of...
has anyone seen a similar situation which helps shed light on this grey area? I have in front of me two publications: Common LISP: The Language, by Guy Steele (et al.) and published by Digital...
My team uses MadCap Flare for documentation and we have an editor on the team. When a writer is ready, we assemble a review package in Flare and send it to the editor, and she makes changes and se...
When I self-published a book some years ago I had the copy shop apply comb bindings for me. At the time this cost about $1/book, but it appears that Stapes and Office Depot now charge closer to $3...
You first described it as "set in the late 1920s", and then later said you were "writing pseudo-historically in an alternate universe". I'm not bringing this up to nit-pick your question but, rath...
The APA style recommends the following for citing anything from web sites (which would include any claim you're reporting from one): New child vaccine gets funding boost. (2001). Retrieved Marc...
The main con is fear of corporate lawyers if they think you're portraying them negatively. I am not a lawyer (nor a writer or publisher of fiction), but my impression as a reader is that minor men...
For internal documentation I've found wikis to be quite useful. A wiki has several useful features for this task: built-in change-tracking doc can be structured as several pages (e.g. one per ma...
For what you need to do legally, you'll need to consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction. Laws vary. The rest of this answer is about practical considerations. First, are you on good terms with the...
As we've seen on earth, communities count time in reference to key events -- the creation of the world, the birth of a new religious figure, the beginning of a king's reign (these ones have less st...
This depends in part on how recognizable the landmark is to readers. On the one hand, if your scene is set in Times Square, it's hard to change anything -- enough people know the place that if you...
Would it count as "previously published" if it appeared in your (print) newspaper, but it was three years ago and nobody is likely to still have old copies lying around? This seems like an analogo...
If you are one of those rare people who can write, straight through, without any major refactorings or changes of direction along the way, more power to you. But for many people, and IMO any long-...
Consider something like the following: ... has only been thoroughly evaluated by a small number of experts in the xx literature, the most significant of which are (author1992, author1994, ...)....
Both phrasings refer to an action that occurred in the past (his going). The additional nuance you need to consider here is whether the question itself sounds like it occurred in the past. A ques...
I've seen this done with a "watermark" that says (usually) "sample data" (kind of like this, from here, though that's a table rather than a chart). Think of the "draft" watermark you sometimes see...
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 ...
Ah, the "you can write in one context, so you must be an expert in writing in another context" fallacy. I've been on the receiving end of that too. Being a good academic writer, or engineering wr...
Consequences. That something is possible within a system doesn't mean it's a good idea. You can drive your car 180MPH on public roads (if the speedometer labeling is accurate), but if you do you'...
Text in all capitals is harder to read than text in mixed case: A 1955 study by Miles Tinker showed that “all-capital text retarded speed of reading from 9.5 to 19.0 per cent for the 5 and 10-m...
