Posts by Mark Baker
One of the things that every writer has to accept is that they pay far greater attention to every aspect of their work than any reader ever will. Sure, the writer can set up a joke on page 7 and gi...
What is wrong with it is that it is not idiomatic, as you note. Writing idiomatically is the important thing here. It really does not matter whether you can explain or justify an idiomatic expres...
What happened to the Questions Tab? We used to be able to see multiple pages of questions and view them in different ways, including "Lottery". Now there is just one page of questions with no navig...
I wish I knew. But I can at least outline where, based on long and bitter experience, I think the challenges lie. Finding a way to surmount them I must leave to others. The first problem is one of...
Monica covers the main points excellently. Beyond that, if there is one specific thing I would suggest that you do to improve and remain relevant as a technical writer, it is learning to code. Thi...
The most obvious approach, depending one where the help is to be displayed, is to use italics for optional items. That is a well established convention in command-line documentation. ARRAY[data-typ...
You are absolutely right that we only want to see the plan once. Either we follow the planning in detail or we follow the execution in detail. We do not need to read it twice. Unless, of course, it...
The standard publishing route remains traditional print publishing. But the thing you have to realize is that publishing is not about printing, it is about marketing and distribution. It is about t...
The up side is more people might read the policy. The down side is that people might not take the policy seriously. They might think you are mocking policy documents. If the policy is to mean anyth...
Audiences want contradictory things. They want to fall in love with a character, and once they fall in love with them, they don't want anything bad to happen to the person they love. But, of course...
Well, there is usually not a lot of inner dialogue in the middle of a sword fight. The slow part of the brain that mulls over stuff switches off and the fast part of the brain the tries to not get ...
I think it is important to note that while there is often one particular moment where the choice is faced and made -- what James Scott Bell calls "the mirror moment", the choice may not necessarily...
It strikes me that there was something contrary to the stated aims of Stack Overflow about the accepted answer button. SO set out not to provide an answer to one individual but to create a permanen...
Lots of people start writing novels in their teens. Most of them are not very good at first. That is to be expected. A novel is one of the most complex forms of art that can be created by a single ...
Well to start with, "Adverbs are the devil" is not a rule. It is not even correct. Adverbs are a perfectly peaceable law abiding part of speech like any other. That many people use adverbs poorly...
Light vs darkness is not and never had been the only theme in novels. In fact, in the simplistic sense in which it is practiced today in things like post-Tolkien fantasy novels, it is a pretty new ...
A character is a bundle of desires. (One could debate whether that is an adequate description of a human being, but characters are not complete human beings, they are artefacts of story.) When you ...
This is a presumption, but my guess is that you have lost interest because there is no drama in your outline. The peril of outlining is that it causes you to focus on events. Events are not dramati...
I have no clue what he meant by designed. But I agree with him that you have not designed the documentation. Why? Because you have not created a list of user tasks. Documentation is a response t...
If you are afraid of being criticized, don't be a writer. You are not writing a documentary. Your responsibility is not to correctly diagnose your characters. Your responsibility is to focus your...
The problem with your names is not that they fail to be distinct, but that they fail to be sticky. The stickiness of a name is a measure of how easily the brain can retain it and assign it to an ob...
Dr. Johnson is supposed to have said that you cannot reproduce the effects of dullness and garrulity without actually being dull and garrulous. Being slightly less 18th century (I'm more of a Victo...
First, understand what a character is in fiction. A character is not simply a person. A character is an instrument for making a story work. You can't simply sit down, dream up a bunch of people, an...
There are two theories of character. One, to which most people give lip service (at least) today, is the one that Galastel has expressed: characters, like people, are complex multidimensional const...
Is there a breaking point where people say, "that makes no sense"? Certainly there is, but I don't think it is anything you can quantify. In fact, it is demonstrable that that point is different fo...
