Posts by Mark Baker
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 ...
Be careful not to confuse the concept of protagonist with the concept of good guy or even hero. Protagonist simply means the main character of the story. Similarly, antagonist does not mean bad guy...
It is not and never has been about making the protagonist likable. It has always been about making them recognizable. If you want a great example of an unlikable protagonist, try Graham Greene's Br...
The good character who turns bad is a classic feature of literature. It is the essence of the literary form we call tragedy. Thus Macbeth opens with high praise for the virtuous Macbeth: SOLDIER...
No, your protagonist does not have to succeed. Your protagonist has to arrive at some difficult choice and make a choice that the reader finds emotionally or morally satisfying. That does not mean ...
There is now and always has been a front door and a back door to every profession that is not government regulated. The front door is generally to go to school, get the appropriate qualifications, ...
It depends on the context. In technical writing, using the list format is generally preferred. In a novel, you would always keep the list inline. In popular non-fiction you will find both styles us...
Well, not specific to the scene-sequel model (for which I would harbour deep suspicion) but in literary terms I would say as disaster is an irreparable loss. A loss you can recover from, from which...
No matter how hard you try to make sure that there is only one possible interpretation of your story, people will interpret it in different ways according to their experience, ideology, and circums...
I don't pretend to be able to interpret Sorkin on this, but I would make this point: When we write, we have punctuation to break sentences into meaningful phrases. In speech, unless you are Victor ...
Well, the best way to introduce a reader to a world is to describe it to them. It worked for Tolkien. It worked for Rowling. It can work for you. The best way to make a fish out of water characte...
Of course the narrator can talk to the reader. That is their job. It is what narrator means. I suspect what you are really asking is, can the narrator comment on the action? Again, the answer is ...
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". Thi...
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 sto...
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, therefo...
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 tech...
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) o...
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, ent...
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 t...
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 distinc...
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 brok...
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 ...
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 ...
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 pain...
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 ...
