Activity for Mark Baker
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
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A: How can we make reviewing HTML documentation easier? On one project I worked on, we did reviews via a work- in-progress server, which was an HTML version of the current state of the docs. We created a modified build script for this server which included the following: - A status indicator for each topic (ready to review, draft, final, etc.) - An ID fo... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Why do many manuals and technical documents seem to prefer passive voice? Well, there is no good practical reason for it. In other words, there are no studies showing that passive voice is more effective in communicating technical information. That leaves us with social reasons, which are necessarily a little more speculative and anecdotal. There is history to suggest that... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: Limitations of automatic documentation Doxygen, etc. do not really generate documentation automatically. They restructure and format information that was written by hand, either in the form of code (which is a form of structured data) or comments written into the code. They format and publish the information automatically. They don't gene... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How much humour is effective in technical documentation? The typical user of technical communication is in a hurry and in a bad mood. They were working along trying to get a job done so they could go home and have supper with the kids then something broke or refused to work the way they thought it should, or a part would not go on properly, or a bug appear... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How do you explain the details of something technical to a non-technical audience? While there are strategies such as the use of analogy and simplified language that can help somewhat, the real issue is that a non-technical audience is non-technical (for a given domain) because they are not interested in the details of that domain. We are all technical in some domain or another, a... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: How to simplify a sentence so that a younger audience can understand it? You can't. 13 year old boys don't care about pocket squares. Period. End of story. There is a vast overemphasis in the writing community on how things are written. The emphasis should be on what things are written. Most communication project do not fail because of how things are said but because of ... (more) |
— | almost 7 years ago |
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A: What does "juvenile tone" mean? The overwhelming concern of the child is to be noticed by adults. It is a constant stream of "look at me, daddy", "look at me, mommy", "look at me, grandpa". Kids act out in school, in public, at the dinner table because they want to be noticed. Even being scolded is, apparently, preferable, for the ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: The Good, the Bad, and the Semicolon Bollocks. (That's a technical term.) The semicolon is the correct punctuation for a particular kind of sentence structure. So on the face of it, if you want to outlaw something, it should be that sentence structure, not the punctuation that is necessary to it. But this is one of those rules like kil... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Moving between a narrator's memories of the past and the "literary present" "Use the present tenses when discussing events in literary works" I don't know where you got this from, but it is not true. The default for stories is to tell them in the past tense, or to be more precise, in the narrative past -- relating them as if the events occurred in the past. This is fundamen... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to properly format a post update on a company blog? There is no universal convention for this, and thus no "proper" way to do it. But I would question is editing an existing blog post is the right way to do this at all. A blog is a "web log". That is, it is sequential in time. One post follows another. The primary organization of the material is simpl... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to edit story structure While no one can say for sure, my guess is that you are probably suffering from what seems to be a recurring problem for people posting here: confusing plot with imaginary history. Story never starts with plot. It always starts with character, and it always starts with a character who wants somethin... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Are there any postulates of literature? Well, within any discussion of literature -- any answer given on this SE for example -- there tend to be lots of ideas postulated. That is, simply, that they are taken as accepted truths by the writer, and usually by the readers as well. They are postulates in context -- simply the things we think we... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Should I write a novel if I haven't read many? In all the author biographies I have read, two things seem to be constant. They are all voracious wide-ranging readers, and they all (or almost all) started writing in some form at a very early age. It follows that they cannot have been widely read at the time they started writing. Wide extensive rea... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Should I, and how should I develop a "filler character"? At the core of every character is a desire. They want something. They are where they are, they do what they do, because they believe that it is leading them to what they desire. They also have a set of values and beliefs that shape how they are willing to behave in order to achieve their desire -- th... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How do I write someone reading a document? I don't think I seen a closeup on a document in any movie made since the 40s. It simply isn't done that way. The way it is done if for the character to be handed the document, open it, and immediately cut to a scene in which two characters are arguing about it. Look at any legal drama made in the las... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a difference between slogans and brand statements? I don't think you should expect to find a term like "brand statement" defined too rigorously. I think you will find different companies using different mechanisms to control their message and calling those mechanisms by different means. I would take the meaning of "brand statement" to be a generic f... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to prevent ebook piracy from stealing your livelihood? It appears to be just the cost of doing business. Pretty much everything I am going to say here comes from https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/ but I will sumarize. First, in the days of paper, authors only got paid for a fraction of the people who read their book. Many readers... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How do I make a book or series of books that take place in three different centuries make sense and flow appropriately? You need to make a very clear distinction between imaginary history and story. It seems to be quite common for aspiring writers to construct elaborate imaginary histories and then struggle to write them down because they are not actually stories. We can't tell from your question if what you have are... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: What is Third Person Dramatic? First and foremost, it an an analytic category. This means it is a category that is used to do literary analysis of existing texts to group different texts according to common features. There are apparently people who find this a diverting exercise. They are not writers. This particular category mea... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: What tense do I use when talking about a character that has died? You use the past tense to report past things and the present tense to report present tense. Death turns a number of present facts about a person into past facts. "John is Chair of the Board" becomes "John was Chair of the Board," but only because John is no longer Chair of the Board. It same would b... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Q about verb tenses for technical writing In these cases it is generally preferable to use the imperative mood: > System developers must transport their systems to the facility in Boulder, CO. The declarative mood (in which the question of tense comes into play) deal with statements of fact. But it does not signal that such a fact is creat... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How do you handle it when a controversial philosophy is an essential part of your story? A useful way to think about this is to recognize that all stories are experiences, not propositions. A philosophy is a proposition, so it is not the matter of stories. But living with the consequences of a proposition is an experience. You can write a story about living with the consequences of beli... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Writer's Block? Or something else? There is no such condition as writer's block. However there are several reasons you may be unable to write. - You may not have anything of consequence to say. Since the young tend to imagine that everything that pops into their heads is of consequence and needs to be expressed, and discover, as the... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: What is the origin of the Hero's Journey? That first story is long lost in the mists of time. Indeed, it could reasonably argued that it is the first and universal story. In a very real sense, this is the story written in the human heart, and the art of the storyteller is not creating this story but discovering and serving the need that exis... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How does one gauge the strength of any particular adverb? Think of a sentence like a Venn diagram. Each word you add to the sentence is like a circle added to the Venn diagram. Each circle added to the diagram should reduce the area that is common to all the circles. If the circle you add does not have any area in common with the other circles or does not r... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Why are clichés discouraged in fiction writing? You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is not a cliche. Writers stick to familiar ground because that is where they find the stories that people w... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Questioning Plagiarism Rules Algorithms cannot detect plagiarism. They can detect a similarity between two text which might or might not be a sign of plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing someone else's work off as your own. You can write a text that is similar to another text (actually this happens all the time) and not be plagiari... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: To make my art or to work for the readers? (For a profits-intended work) I think this is a false dichotomy. Art is a form of communication. It fails if it does not communicate. We hear a lot of talk about "expressing yourself" but that is hollow unless you are expressing yourself to someone. We are social animals. We strive to make ourselves understood to others. Good art... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Do people keep reading because of what's ahead or what's behind? Consider the mania around spoilers. Why do we demand that people discussing books and TV shows online warn us if their posts are going to contain any information about how the story ends. Here's the thing about spoilers: if the point of reading a book was to find out what happened, spoilers would be... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to tactfully inform readers of differences in the book world to the real world? The simple answer is that you don't. You don't tell the reader anything that is not needed to support the plot of theme of the story. There are a lot of people who enjoy world building as a hobby and when they have built a world they want to write a novel set in it as a way of taking people on a gui... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: What makes a good death scene? As is the case with any scene intended to evoke strong emotion from the reader, 90% of the effect is achieved via the setup. If the reader is going to scream "please don't", it will not be because of how the death scene itself is written. It will be because of how they have come to feel about the cha... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Plot and characters conflict too much Plot is the servant of character. One of the most common mistakes of beginning writers seems to be to start by inventing a plot -- essentially an imaginary history -- and then peopling it with characters to make it go. But stories are about characters. More specifically, they are about character arc.... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to slow down the pace of the story? You never want to slow down the pace of a story. Pace is everything. But pace is not about rushing to the exits. A pace is a comfortable speed at which to see all the scenery and experience everything that the journey has to offer. If the pace feels too rushed, this is not about the speed per se, it ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Is the strategy described here an effective one, to distinguish character voice? Be careful not to fall into writer as actor syndrome, imagining the movie of your book and how the actors might act the parts. You are writing a novel, not a prose description of a movie. While you can certainly create a visceral experience of sight and sound (and smell, and tastes, and touch) in a ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: In fiction writing, how can one make the passage of time seem shorter? Stories are asynchronous. There is no particular connection between story time and calendar time. The length of a story is determined by the complexity of its action and the depth of its detail, not by the elapsed time between its inciting incident and its denouement. You will sometimes have to make... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: What would you call non human "people"? We tend to have more and simpler words for things we talk about regularly than for things we talk about seldom, so there probably isn't an exact equivalent to "human" for ants, at least, not one the average reader would recognize. So I think you have to ask what effect you are trying to produce for ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How can I write a realistic motorcycle crash? The human perceptual system runs on anticipation. We understand things that play out in predictable and foreseen ways. We are disoriented by things that happen suddenly, violently, and out of the blue. We come away from those incidents with a jumble of poorly integrated memories of light and noise bu... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How can I make a setting which shows something? Stories create experiences. Stories that are heavy on setting create an experience of that setting. People sometimes simply receive an experience for what it is. We are experience junkies. Stories are one of the ways that we satisfy our need for experiences. They help keep us sane. People often draw... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Is there a name for layers of subtext? Your subtext2 is what is generally called foreshadowing. That is, it hints at something important that is yet to be revealed: the clouds on the horizon that hint at rain. It is not really a form of subtext. Subtext is a very loose term (and, frankly, I think we would be better off without it) but it ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How do I write sexual tension between two characters? Tension (of any sort) lies in what doesn't happen. To create tension you create the expectation that something is about to happen, but then don't let it happen. This keeps the reader waiting for it to happen, and that is tension: waiting for something to happen that you expect, hope for, or dread. T... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to make a statement formulated like an exclamation, but even-toned? On the old typewriters, there was no `!` key. To create an exclamation mark you had to type a single quote, backspace, and type a period. That was a good system. Exclamation marks should be hard to type. There is a good argument to be made for breaking them off your keyboard altogether. There is a l... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to know the reason for rejection? Publications don't explain why they reject things because: a. It takes time. b. If they do, people will argue with them and call them names. c. If they do, people will try to fix the piece and send it back, creating even more work for them. But there are really just three reasons why a publicatio... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Is a neutral/impartial story "boring"? For the sort of poor soul who can only enjoy themselves if they are rooting for one side in a fight, then I suppose that a story that does not take sides will be boring. But that is not and never has been the function and appeal of art. Art is about seeing the world as it is, but more acutely, with ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to avoid repetitive sentences? (Describing actions, he/she) First and foremost, I would suggest that you resist the urge to describe everything that happens in a scene. In a movie, all the actions of a scene like that are acted out and are visible on screen, though it might take several viewings before you actually saw everything that every actor was doing. B... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Do modern readers believe the first person narrator can't die? I suspect that most reader expect the narrator is not going to die. But you should not look on the device of the involved narrator as requiring the maintenance of strict logic about when the story was written down. Using an involved narrator is a literary device. It is not intended to imply that the... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to avoid being too wordy It is the lure of the fine phrase. We all want to create fine phrases, phrases that are a thing of beauty in their own right. But the lure of the fine phrase can often lead us into the verbose and the excessively ornate. There is nothing wrong with fine phrases. We should pull off a fine phrase when... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How to avoid constantly starting paragraphs with "The character did this" "The character did that"? This seems to be an increasingly common problem and my belief is that it results from the writer consciously or unconsciously seeing the movie in his head and trying to transfer it to the page. Thus they give what are essentially stage directions at every verse end. To break this habit, you have to ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: How does one write fluff? I think the heart of your difficulty is that you are equating light hearted with not serious ("fluff"). Your intuition that it is easier to write dark than light is correct, at least in the sense that going dark is an easy way to seem serious while covering up the fact that you don't actually have an... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Is it dull to have a world where all characters cannot speak properly? The great privilege of the novelist is that you can choose what sources of interest you create in your novel. Novels today tend to be dialogue heavy, partly in response to "Show don't Tell" and partly because the writer and the reader probably watch more TV than they read novels. But that does not me... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |
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A: Does misspelling words for the sake of bad English improve the immersion or distract the reader? Dialect writing can be extremely difficult to read. The preferred technique today seem to be to do just a very small hint of it. The best way to portray the background and intelligence of a person is through the words they choose and the ideas they express. People from different areas use different ... (more) |
— | about 7 years ago |