Posts by Neil
I agree with hildred's answer that a review of the basics is in order here: Sentence structure, grammar, and so on. There are no standards for general-interest articles, but academic papers do ha...
Great start! from this: Publishing and the like is a completely different field. ...are we going to assume that, with publishing off-topic (for now, I know that this is all pretty rough) sho...
Different versions of Word count words slightly differently. For files that are just text, this isn't generally a problem, it's things like text in graphics and footnotes that throw this off. There...
Whether to outline a story thoroughly or not at all is a question that's been asked for a long time. But some general information may help. If you're writing on your own, you can write however yo...
This isn't a comic strip, it's prose. Written this way, the slap seems cartoony. I'd much rather you describe the action than simply recite the sound it makes.
I don't know a single person who uses "of African descent" in everyday speech and the people I spend time with are pretty accepting, liberal-Democrat New Jersey sorts of people. The black people I ...
The best advice I can give you is to write a post that fits into the blog where you're going to publish it. Universe Factory seems to favor short posts, and I see a couple of multipart posts, so I'...
There's nothing wrong with writing a foreword to a book; ones written by the translator are sometimes called something like "Translator's Foreword" or "About this Translation", etc. Whether you s...
We can't tell you what should happen in your story. (In fact, questions asking what to write are off-topic here.) But perhaps you can ask yourself a few questions: If the scene is described grap...
It's probably useful to think of a developmental editor as a project manager. While it's often associated with non-fiction, but it's not unheard of for novelists to hire a developmental editor. (I ...
I think this passage works brilliantly to set the mood. The transition from the bolded paragraph back to the story is a little abrupt, but this may be smoothed over by the momentum of reading this ...
As far as I can tell, no. Use normal sentence case, where you capitalize the first word of a headline only. The exceptions are proper nouns, or other capitalized words listed in the style guide's s...
INT. STARBUCKS, LOS ANGELES People are sitting at tables and on couches, some on smartphones, many typing away on laptops. We pan to a man in his 40's, with a ponytail and reading glasses. He is c...
In the sense you mean, it probably stands for general fiction, i.e. not romances, science-fiction, or mysteries. (Fiction that is "literary".) There's a lot of genre fiction that has excellent char...
I agree with Lauren's answer; there's no sense in "balancing" things for the sake of one scene. There are a few ways I can see to handle this: You can encapsulate narrators to keep a single viewp...
There's no one answer to this, and there might have been many reasons for the author tot write the article like she did. My guess is that it's an attempt to make the Dropbox CEO seem innovative and...
The best date formats are the ones that are (1) clear and (2) familiar to your audience. You want your readers to focus on the content of your resume/CV, and this will be difficult if they have to ...
(I'm answering this from a point-of-view of readability. If your corporate communications are subject to any internal style sheets or style guide such as AP or Chicago - since you have a policy on ...
The issue here is that you want to avoid an identity disconnect between the reader and this character. If the reader is connecting to this character only through their name, then this is not only a...
With the disclaimer that I'm neither a tech writer or tech editor: Scientific and academic books are generally organized by function. Unlike a narrative book where the chapters are broken down by ...
I found this page after searching the web: How to Reference a Book in AP Style. It outlines how to cite sources, but annoyingly enough, doesn't cite the information it gives. I suspect it's from th...
William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride and the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wrote Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell, both of which are essentially mem...
Webster's New World Rhyming Dictionary: Clement Wood's Updated This is the rhyming dictionary I turn to first. It's an update to Clement Wood's classic 1943 reference. The phonetic distribution of...
The Song-Writer's Rhyming Dictionary, by Sammy Cahn Out of print, worth looking for. The introduction alone, an essay by the author about the process of lyric writing, is worth the purchase price....
Using dialect or slang can work very well, but it usually doesn't. (Mark Twain is the only example I can think of where it was done well.) Slang is another matter, with some of the same pitfalls. H...
