Posts by Mark Baker
Dialect writing was quite popular among authors in the 19th and early 20th century. Both Twain and Kipling indulged in it extensively. In an age where few had the opportunity to travel and there we...
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...
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 t...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 intonat...
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-...
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 recogni...
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 ten...
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 reaso...
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...
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 se...
If you lead with a compelling concept, you should write an essay. A story is not, principally, about exploring an idea. Principally it is about creating an experience. Creating an experience can be...
The normal process for a non-fiction book is to sell it first, then write it. The reason is that non-fiction books sell based largely on the author's qualifications, the soundness of the idea, and ...
I think cheese, as you call it, is simply one aspect of work that is not morally serious. What do I mean by morally serious? In the literary sense, I mean that a work that is morally serious is one...
I would tend to match the case of the interface, but here is a way to think it through: Labels on interface elements are often brief instructions rather than actual names. The capitalization of th...
Centuries don't have styles; writers have styles. True, there are certain broad features of the way things are written which change over time, but they are very much secondary to the styles of indi...
Copyright is automatic. If you write something, you own the copyright on it. If you write something for hire, the person who hires you owns the copyright on it. Certain jurisdictions may provide a ...
There are no original story ideas. It has all been done before. Any originality lies in the telling, not in the story idea. And, the publishing industry cares about originality about as much as t...
This is really all about cadence. You break up a text, at various levels, as an expression of its cadence. A slower cadence tends to express itself in longer sentences, longer paragraphs, longer ch...
They generally announce to the reader the beginning of a new story arc. I think that's about all there is to it. The format of a sequence of short story arcs that combine more or less loosely to fo...
Standard punctuation for an incomplete sentence is ellipsis. But don't. Don't have one character interrupt another at all. Dialogue is not speech and the page is not the screen. The page is an a...
Fantasy literature is full of examples of characters passing between real and imaginary worlds. It is one of the core theme of fantasy literature. Indeed, the roots of fantasy literature are all in...
A name is not actually an invariant property of a person or object. A name is an expression of the relationship between a person and another or between a person and an object. Thus the same person ...
