Posts by Lauren Ipsum
It's all about context. I don't think there's a blanket answer. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is, in a sense, a flashback in the middle of the story, but it works exquisitely.
I've never used Notepad, but can it create PDFs? Or at least print to PDF? Because Acrobat Pro has a dandy set of markup tools which I use all the time for proofreading emails: Highlights Sticky...
Ten out of 66,000 words would be acceptable to me, particularly if the proofreader has only gone through it once. You always catch more on the second round because on the first you're reading for b...
Knowing nothing about this particular style, my impulse would be to define it on first reference in each kind of copy, and use the abbreviation after that. So the first time you use it in running ...
This is one of those things you can't always determine on your own. Give your finished story to several people to read and ask them to tell you if they felt like they understood how the world worke...
I would use commas between each component, and use "and" only if the last component is seconds. I learned way back in intermediate school that "and" is only used before fractions (so 10,247 is said...
Whatever works best for your story. If you can make it work in a real setting and you know or can research the setting well enough to make it work, do that. If your story requires something which...
After you write your first draft, you will see from actual use what terms are dependent on other terms. That will allow you to reorder your definitions and put the ones you need first in front. Yo...
I sympathize with the sentiment, but no, you can't use "black humor" and "shop talk" in a book like that. Such comments have to be kept in-house and preferably not written down. We all complain abo...
What you might want to do is get the whole thing written as a three-act piece with exposition in the beginning. Set it aside for a month, and then come back and see if the opening is too slow. If i...
That's not a bad opening. I might change it to "Today we're going to talk about..." to make it more inclusive, but there's nothing wrong with being straightforward. Another version might be "Today ...
Well, let's start... Specifically, this post You just lost us. "This post" often means "an external piece to which I am linking" or "some text which is going to follow shortly," rather than ...
I think you can use "click" with relative impunity. Even someone on a tablet or smartphone knows that "click" equates to "tap" with a touch interface. If you really feel strongly about it, you can ...
First, commas indicate pauses, so put them where a speaker or reader would naturally pause. "Look, Jones," That one is important, because there's always a bit of a pause between a command and...
If I'm understanding you correctly, I think what you want are case studies to demonstrate your points. So you put forth one of your arguments — "switching to the individual bucket version reduces ...
In addition to Monica's great suggestions for structure once you've located the problem, you need to develop a way to find all the problem sentences. Either at the beginning or end of every writi...
No, no, no, hell no, frak no, can I get a no from the peanut gallery? oh, and NO. We are not typing on typewriters any more. We are using computers. Word processors, HTML, CSS. Underlining means a...
After it's written, and you're polishing, think about vowel sounds. There should be very few words or lines which end on hard consonants (K, T) because you want the sounds and the lines to flow in ...
This is a speech. Uther, whatever his other faults, does give good speech, but so do many modern English speakers. If you want all your characters to speak in speechese — long-winded, complex, win...
I do actually read certain dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun, so I won't be of much help, other than offering another vote for Strunk & White. :) Actually, I feel like you're going about...
This is fine with me. You can have just one POV, multiple POVs, you can even have multiple first-person POVs if you really want. (That might leave your reader confused, but that could be what you i...
Hemingway did it in six. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
I just finished working on a 150-page Corporate Style Guide, so while I can answer this question in great detail if you want, my answer is not for WritersSE, I think. AP and Chicago are mostly ab...
@Kate The first time around, I have a nice outline with a logical flow, the second time around, the flow has been lost, and I am interested in knowing the steps and order of steps required to put H...
This sounds like a job for... Scrivener! :D Building on Kate's question: Create your outline. Write each section of your outline as a separate Scrivener document. Label them appropriately. (II...
