Posts by Monica Cellio
This is a decision you need to make in consultation with your company's legal advisors. The ability to defend against claims is affected by both what the warranty says and how prominent it is. A ...
Rules? No, not beyond any that your publisher or editor might have. But one factor to consider is that, assuming you're not publishing in a specialized or foreign market, your readers probably wo...
Outlines vary in how much text they cover; some people might write a multi-page outline for the same content for which another would write: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy goes to mad-s...
This is almost never done in my experience (which is mostly with technical documentation and some journal articles), for the reason implicit in your question: it's confusing. Once you start carvin...
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...
I think you're being tripped up by some mistaken impressions. First, you suggest that ungrammatical and/or persuasive writing is "creative". Maybe some of it is, but that's hardly the definition ...
I don't know how much benefit you'll get on a resume from having read about, as opposed to used, DITA, but some knowledge is better than none. DITA is both a specific framework and an approach. M...
From a strictly grammatical point Lauren's answer is right -- you're talking about something that happened in the past, so "that was" is correct. However, dialogue is often more colloquial and a f...
Realism has several components. Different ones dominate in different genres/settings and among individual readers. (Real) setting accuracy: If you're describing a real place or a time in history...
That's not a comma splice; that's a statement followed by an elaboration.1 The second does not stand alone, so a semicolon there would be incorrect. This would be a comma splice: It had been ...
As this answer says, it's important to state your assumptions, whatever they are. Sometimes there just isn't enough data, though, and I understand your question to be about what to do in that case...
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...
Elves and dwarves are all over fantasy fiction. Here's one compilation found by Googling "fantasy novels with elves". They are generic mythological creatures. If anything these tropes are overus...
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 ...
While it's possible to expand a short story into a novel (c.f. Ender's Game), what seems more common in my experience (citation needed) is for the short story to become one part of a larger novel. ...
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...
The main challenge of having multiple writers is dealing with conflicts -- either you have to lock files to prevent concurrent edits (as Word does), or you need a way to compare and merge changes. ...
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...
In books that go through multiple editions, you will sometimes see "preface to the first edition", "preface to the second edition", etc. In other words, there is precedent for not editing it out b...
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...
I can't call specific examples to mind right now, but I've seen this sort of "wait, the world is not quite as it should be" situation handled by sharing the POV character's inner dialogue as he gra...
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...
