Posts by Lauren Ipsum
Any course you have to take in order to take a subsequent course is a prerequisite. It doesn't make any difference if you take the initial course your first year, third year, or sixth year. The pre...
As others have noted, at absolute minimum you must have someone look over your work for technical mistakes (spelling, grammar, sentence structure, vocabulary). You must do this even if you self-pub...
"Could" in the first one is just the past tense of "can," as you correctly note. In the second example, you are referring to a possibility in the "farther back" past. "Could Tom's mother have been...
Please note I am describing American English punctuation convention, where the quotes go outside the final punctuation mark. I am aware that British English punctuation is handlded differently. Th...
How do your users read and use the manual? If they use it as a textbook, where 95% of the readers start at the beginning and progress through to the end in linear fashion, then put all the new inf...
Off the top of my head, CJ Cherryh's Morgaine saga (female mage, male assistant), three or four books, no romance. (removing this per @what's comment below) ETA so wow, it turned out to be a lot h...
(This might get good answers on WorldBuilding SE also.) I think you have to decide, from a storytelling viewpoint, how these people communicate. Does each individual have his/her own thoughts but ...
Yes, the narrator can be a secondary character. The beautiful Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is about the warrior Achilles and his life, but told by his lover Patroclus. The Great Gatsby is...
The key is in what "as were the others" refers back to. It's not just "the chairs." It's not even that "the chairs were upside-down." It's that "the other chairs" are in a specific state of being...
I would put the quotes in the link, because the quotes are around the title of the article and are therefore part of it. The CSS formatting is a question better asked on Graphic Design SE.
It is personification. Simile and metaphor are both comparing X to Y, but in different ways. A simile always uses "like" or "as": "The rustling of the branches was like trees whispering to each ...
My general rules, adapted from AP style: In narrative prose, use digits for 10 through 99. Use digits for 100 and above unless the number can be expressed in two words (like two thousand or f...
You could use empty brackets with a space between them. Brackets are generally used to alter a quote inline, such as fixing grammar or to add information like a name so the quoted material will wor...
If you as the writer find the process of X fascinating, you will be able to translate that to the page in a way which makes it fascinating for the reader. If you enjoy math, you talk about the sa...
Mercy, yes. If the story is burning to be told, yes. If you enjoy the craft of writing, yes. If you love reading over what you've written, yes. If you like the world you've created and the people y...
Describe what she's seeing which makes her perceive Terrence's emotions. Lana looked over at Terrence, who had deliberately put himself into John's shadow. Emotions flickered over Terrence's fa...
Parody is a mockery of a specific existing thing. Weird Al Yankovic writes parodies — "Beat It" as "Eat It," for example. Saturday Night Live parodies political figures by mimicking their qualities...
First of all, "withheld" means "held something back from," as in "she withheld the cookies from her child" or "he withheld the information from Congress." So it doesn't mean "hold up to" a big stor...
Short answer: You can't. But you shouldn't worry about it. Good textbooks get updated. They are refreshed and corrected, new material is added, things are changed to reflect reader/student/teacher...
My thought is, if you can remove the text (which you've bolded) and it still makes sense — that is, if there is no other reasonable interpretation — you can take it out. Can Cath reasonably cover ...
We've addressed "the protagonist continues to talk after dying, even in first person" here: Ways for main character to influence world following their death 1st person story, but the main charact...
(Distillation of the comments:) Are you talking about the famous J. Evans Pritchard quoted in Dead Poets Society? He is apparently a pseudonym for Laurence Perrine, and the text is more or less ta...
Monica is on the right track, but I'd push it more. If he's howling the name of his murdered wife in his grief, he's not aware of anything outside that grief. I would actually not show the husban...
I think the confusion around this example is because the problem is going to happen no matter what Ralph does, so his actions won't change anything. He will have to face living alone whether he wri...
I would use a fictional house number. You don't want to end up with the 221B Baker Street problem — so many people over the years thought Sherlock Holmes was real and tried to reach him that the ge...
