Activity for Mark Bakerâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: Character crisis for a Science Hero? Science and faith are not opposites. They are different modes of knowing. They are other modes of knowing as well, such as logic, mathematics, ethics, and the historical method. Each of them addresses a different subject matter and we use each of them according to type of evidence available to us and... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Words we may believe are neutral yet have restricted connotations I'm not sure that the issue with enormity is that it has emotional baggage. The issue is that it has restricted usage -- it is only use in certain constructions such as "enormity of the crime". This is not a matter of emotional baggage so much as simply an accident of the development of standard usag... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you write a Stack Exchange answer? That is an interesting question and and interesting observation. Is the Stack Exchange answer a distinct genre? Or perhaps more broadly is the QA site answer a distinct genre. If it is, I think it is an example of a more pervasive genre that was created by the Web, which we might call persistent conv... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a dialog tag for when someone is saying something in awe? How many ways are there to say "Oooooooo!" Only one that I can think of. Therefore the only dialog tag you need is "said". The only reason to use a dialogue tag other than "said" is if the intonation of the dialogue is not clear either from the words themselves or from the context in which they are ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to quote something somebody was told by someone else? (Third-party, hearsay) The classic case of this is Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which is almost entirely in the dialogue of the narrator from the frame story. > "It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-pint champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz had... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Describing body language? One of the things you discover pretty quickly as a writer is that there are all kinds of things that we do not have words for. Worse, even if there were words of them, most people would not recognize what they meant. (How many people know what it means to say that someone stands with arms akimbo?) T... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How To Settle On An Ending? You really should not have much choice of endings. Of course, you have all kinds of choices in the specific details of the ending. But in a larger sense the function of the ending of a story is to prove through action that the protagonist has made the choice that they are shown to have made at the cl... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Coincidence of Similarity in Writing Finding something truly unique on the Web is pretty rare. What you find far more often are a hundred different ways of saying the same thing. Even on Stack Exchange, which goes to considerable pains to detect and eliminate duplicate questions, multiple instances of essentially the same question aboun... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Converting/rewriting present tense narratives to past tense gracefully. Not a question about verb conjugation One of the great misconceptions is that a story can be written in the past tense or the present tense. This is not the case. Individual sentences and sometimes phrases are written in particular tenses. Any substantial passage of prose is likely to contain multiple tenses. Stories are written in the ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I introduce languages that will be spoken in the long term? Does it actually matter to the story that the language they are speaking changes? Most of the time in international stories, the difference is language is not germane to the plot in any way and is simply ignored. A well-told story focuses the reader's attention on the elements that matter to the sto... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How can I understand characters whose worldview is alien to my own? The only way you can really pull this off convincingly is through humility. If you are to approach a person you disagree with with sympathy, you have to start with the notion that they are neither irrational, malevolent, or crazy, but rather a sincere and rational human being who has reached differen... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to make the murder's identity less obvious, or make the obviousness not matter? This is an "I have chosen the wrong point of view for the story I want to tell. How do I make it work anyway?" question. We get them a lot. The answer is, change the point of view so that the story does work. Choose the right tools for the job. If someone asks you, "I am entering a hundred yard das... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: What is the difference between limited third-person narrative and free indirect discourse? Limited third-person narrative and free indirect discourse are analytical categories invented by academics to classify the techniques of writers because classification is what academics do (regardless of whether such classification produces anything useful). Academics are often bitter rivals so it i... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay to include world-building facts by "telling" instead of "showing"? You have to understand what show vs tell means in the context of prose. In a movie, you can show something by pointing the camera at it. In prose, all you have is words and all you can do with words is tell things. Showing in a prose context therefore means telling us one thing which leads us to see... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How should I document a product release with an inherently flawed design? This is essentially a business problem, which is not to say it is off topic, because technical writers exist to solve business problems. But it is not a problem the writer should try to solve on their own. You have to get guidance from the product manager. However, there is a very good chance that t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Is it better to use "firstnamelastname.com" for a portfolio site, or something unique? First of all, if your firstnamelastname.com domain is available, claim it now. Even if you don't decide to use it immediately, it is a valuable asset that you might not be able to claim later. I would say that firstnamelastname.com is much more effective when people have heard of your first and last... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How to get my book taken seriously as a teenager? If you write a serious book, people will take it seriously. If you write a book that people take seriously at age 13, people will consider you a phenom. But it almost never happens, and the reason is that a book is a highly complex piece of art that depends both on an in-depth grasp of storytelling ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I spot an unintentional promise in my story? What a fascinating question. I suspect that the answer is that you can't with perfect certainty. There will probably always be readers who will pick up your book hoping for one thing, thinking in the early going that they are going to get it, and then being disappointed in the end when they don't. In... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Submitting things I post on my blog for publication Legally there is no issue. It is your work. You own the copyright. You can licensed anyone you like to make copies no matter how many copies have already been made (subject, of course, to any rights you have already sold). The issue is going to be what individual publications are willing to accept. ... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: Should software product release notes be in marketing voice or technical voice? (software documentation) I think that there is a very strong case to be made that this distinction between marketing voice and tech comm voice should be avoided entirely. There are two main reasons for this: 1. In ancient times, when tech comm and marketing were delivered on paper, each came to the customer at a different t... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do you mix dialogue with actions of a character? There is always the temptation these days for a writer to try to act out a scene as they imagine it playing on a movie screen. But this does not work in prose. It is impossible in prose to have two things happen at once. The reader can only read one word at a time and a rapid back and forth between d... (more) |
— | about 6 years ago |
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A: How do I include a powerful theme in my story without making it blatantly obvious? Just as a technical matter, a theme is not a message. Love is a theme. Love sucks is a message. When you say you want to get across a message in your writing, what you are saying is that you want to change people's minds about some issue: either change what they think about the issue or change how i... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Our team needs to automate many routine tasks. Can we use a single tool or do we need to use multiple ones? To automate any data manipulation task you need two things: - Access to the metadata or pattern in the source data that you want to act on. - The ability to change the metadata or data of the source in such a way that you don't corrupt the file or make it unreadable. The reason that so many syste... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it redundant to repeat a subject when it's been implied in a college essay? Redundancy in prose is often useful because people forget things and because the real world relationships implied by the grammatical relationships is not always clear. One often finds that overzealous editing for brevity can do a hatchet job on clarity. Technically the meaning may have been preserve... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Should important events that happen a long time before the rest of the story be in a prologue or in chapter 1? You are not writing a history, you are writing a novel. In a history, the temporal sequences of events is generally the mainspring of the narrative. In a novel, the story arc of the protagonist is the mainspring of the narrative. Events should therefore be narrated in the order that they impact the s... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Still struggling with character desire, positive vs. negative, hooking readers Root for the guy is not really the magic elixir you are after. As I have said before, the heart of every story is a choice. It is not enough to make your character want something. The pursuit of that desire, whether the desire itself is considered positive or negative, is not enough. It must lead the... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to derive a storyline from a beginning? If you don't have a middle and an end, you don't have a beginning. I don't mean that you have to work out all the details of the middle and the end before you begin, because you can work those out as you go if that is how you work. What I mean is that the beginning sets up the middle and the end so i... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can a "rip-off" still be good? Ah, the myth of originality. (Hi @LaurenIpsum! Waves.) No one in the publishing industry wants originality. Not publishers. Not readers. The only people in the orbit of publishing that claim to value originality are snarky internet trolls and bad tempered newspaper columnists. And these people, of c... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it better to repeat steps listed elsewhere in a manual, or to refer the reader to where the steps are listed elsewhere in the manual? I think there is one thing to be said on this that is not covered by Does DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Apply to Documentation? and that is this: It is not uncommon that there are common operations that must be performed as part of many different tasks. For instance, you might have to log on to the ad... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Writing dialogue Dialogue is an action like any other action in a novel. The amount of dialogue in any given novel should be a function of how much of the action of the novel -- the working out of the story shape of the novel -- involves people talking to each other. In some novels the working out of the story arc r... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is there a word or a sets of words that describe a persons beautiful dead face? First let me say that the notion that a dead face cannot be beautiful is nonsense. Some may never has seen a dead face they found beautiful, but many have, and I see no reason not to believe them. But whether a dead face is objectively beautiful (supposing you are willing to grant the traditional we... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What are the things that only Stories can do? I disagree with Amadeus on the matter of becoming the protagonist. I don't think that is what literature does or why readers turn to literature. I think there is always a narrative distance. We are always hearing a story told, and that is a different thing from doing something yourself. If I read abo... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is inner monologue a bad way to show character traits? Not necessarily, but the propensity to indulge in internal monologue is itself a character trait. Fundamentally, the way we assess the character of someone in fiction is the same a how we assess their character in life: by their actions. Sometimes it makes sense to shortcut the process of establishin... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What strategies are there to document data lineage and keep it updated with a minimum amount of maintenance? I worked on a project that sounds similar to yours in which the ability to identify every process that touched every piece of data was vital in order to minimize the amount of code validation that had to be redone whenever any other piece of code changed. To show the flow of data through processes, ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How to communicate character desire? I doubt the issue is whether the desires are stated explicitly or implied by actions. I suspect the issue has more to do with story shape. If we use the hero's journey model, and novel opens in the normal world, where we establish what the character loves and who they are. Then comes the call to acti... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: What constitutes a 'hook?' I hate the word hook (in this context, it is useful for talking about fishing). It implies some kind of violent capture (fishing again). Who wants to be hooked? Fish? Drug addicts? The problem with the word it that implies a kind of sudden and intrusive attachment. That leads writers to suppose that... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it okay to use "fell" in one sentence, and "fall" in the next sentence? Yes, absolutely. Repetition is a well known rhetorical and dramatic technique. Unfortunately, you will get English teachers that will tell you that you must always vary your words. I have seen people in critique groups who hardly ever contribute anything other than to criticise repetition of words, ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How can I learn subtlety? Well, to start with, what you are describing is not subtlety. Subtlety is paying attention to the small but significant details of something -- making a subtle point or a subtle distinction. What you are talking about is indirection: suggesting one thing by saying another. It is closely related to t... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Is it acceptable to use synonyms to achieve rhythm? As someone who worries a lot about rhythm in my own writing, I would say that rhythm is more often achieved by changing word order than by by changing words. Prose rhythm does not depend on exact scansion anyway, so choosing a word with a different stress pattern doesn't do that much for you. Prose r... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I show dust/ ashes being blown away by the wind in a story? This is where the show don't tell doctrine becomes particularly pernicious. It is all telling. All you have is words. All words can do is tell. To apply show don't tell to prose, you have to show A by telling B. So, if you want to show that Joe is nervous you replace telling us he is nervous: > Joe... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How do I write an action scene? First, make sure that you are not subconsciously trying to write a movie fight scene. Movie fight scenes are all about movement and noise (and generally far too long and tedious for anyone older than 10). Good fight scenes in the movies are actually more dialogue than action. (Consider the sword figh... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: How much does style contribute to the overall value of a novel? "Everybody can invent a story" -- No. In his classic book Story, Robert McKee reports just the opposite: There are a great many people who can write beautiful prose. There are very few who can tell a captivating story. My years of critique groups and writing classes bear this out. Most of the manusc... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Does DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) Apply to Documentation? No. Don't repeat yourself is a good content management rule, which is what it is in programming as well. If you have two instances of the same thing it becomes harder to manage them. If it were not for the management issues it raises, there would be no point to the DRY doctrine. But the same pieces ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Where would I specify which user is required to run an administration command? People do not read the documentation through. They dip into a specific spot in pursuit of one instruction on how to accomplish their task of the moment. As far as the reader is concerned, therefore, Every Page is Page One. There is no rest of the manual. There is only this page. It is all I am looki... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Alternatives better to the binary "0b..." format? People will type things the way you write them in the documentation. People are looking for concrete instructions on what to do, not philosophical discussion of the working of the system. So, enter them in the documentation the way people should enter them in the product. (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Terminology question - "if-else" or "if/else"? In this case I think what you want is if...else. The slash tends to be used to suggest alternatives: yes/no answer. But you are talking about a case where both are present. The hyphen is used to make a phrase into a word you can talk about. Instances have an is-a relationship to their class. But if... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Formatting of Text in Technical Writing (Procedure Writing) This is all about recognition. The user may recognize the component being mentioned by name (verbal) or by sight (visual). Recognition by name is sufficient in most cases. If you are going for recognition by name, the the reason for bolding the text in the manual is to offset the name from the rest ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Can "numbers" be good doc performance metrics? Is there a way to meaningfully interpret the quantitative user data we gather? It is extremely difficult to measure the performance of a technical document because it is hard to gather the data and hard to interpret the data when you have it. Let's start with the aim of technical communication. The aim is to make the user of a product productive by enabling them to use the pro... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Traits of Bad Writers - Analysing Popular Authors The novel is one of the most complex pieces of art that humans create, and the enjoyment of novels can be based on many different characteristics. Without trying to be exhaustive, we could distinguish these five elements in a novel that may satisfy readers to different degrees: - Prose: the ability ... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |
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A: Bridging the gap between colloquial usage and technical meaning of terms People choose words to make distinctions. Sometimes the distinctions they are trying to make are fine-grained and sometimes they are not. In many cases, the people making the coarse-grained distinctions are not even aware that the fine-grained distinctions exist. People tend to choose the most famili... (more) |
— | over 6 years ago |