Posts by Mark Baker
My blog is still being read, and at about the same level it always was. But as blogs have become a popular form of content marketing, it is inevitable that fewer and fewer of them are being read....
I think you need to join them into a single step, or else there is a risk that the user will do the first step without paying attention to the indicator arm, and may thus hold the input vane open t...
You don't have to know how it ends, but you do have to know how it begins. It begins with some pain, some longing, some need, some disturbance in the equanimity of life that forces some deep deviat...
Story arises out of a challenge to character. The same event may challenge some characters and not others. A given character will be challenged by some events and not others. So, to create a stor...
At risk of sounding glib, I would say "as many as will fit". But I think that probably is the answer. A chapter should have a shape to it. It should accomplish something. It should have focus. As m...
The GNU site itself treats the name of the Make utility as an uppercased word: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ There does seem to be a convention to frequently use make (the command) where Make...
I don't believe that one is preferred over the other or that you have to be consistent. However, I do believe that they signal something slightly different, at least in certain locales. In the En...
I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG too...
Bold is one way to emphasize something in a sentence. Recasting the sentence to put the emphasis where you want it is another method. Is one preferable to another? I'm not sure. The point of any wr...
It all comes down to the familiarity of the audience with the interface. The words of a procedure describe parts of the interface. Will the audience immediately recognize which parts of the interfa...
Don't mislead the reader. It is a cheap trick that will leave the reader unsatisfied and disinclined to trust you as an author. This does not mean you cannot have surprise, but the surprise should ...
Simply choose another adjective: I drove past the empty stables and the deserted servant's quarters, and after another quarter mile I entered a very large circular driveway. Or break up the s...
Tolkien wrote a wonderful essay called "On Fairy Stories" in which he essentially rejected the notion of suspension of disbelief as an explanation of what is going on when a reader reads any kind o...
What makes a passage strong is almost always its context. We walk by the wonders of nature unseeing everyday. Only at certain times and in certain moods or circumstances do we pause to notice them ...
It is easy to imagine that moments of religious experience are great strum and drang affairs, but they are more often moments of quietness. Not the storm but the calm after the storm. Consider 1 Ki...
I'm not sure where we got the notion that readers have to identify with the main character. We are one of the most narcissistic societies of recent memory but we are still interested in people othe...
There are plenty of examples of novels about adults written for young people in the canon. Look at Rosemary Sutcliffe for example. But this involves a different view of how a reader identifies with...
You can certainly look at it from the market perspective. What one editor rejects another may accept. What 100 editors reject, the 101st editor may accept. But you can also look at it from the per...
Two dogs. One bone. The dogs are antagonists. Which is the good dog? Which is the bad dog? One dog may have the objective right to the bone, but that does not change how each dog sees things. Ea...
John Carroll did extensive research on an aspect of this in the 80s. His finding are recorded in a book called "The Nurnberg Funnel" and lead to the development of a practice called "minimalism" in...
The key question to ask in deciding if something is in or out in technical communication is this: What would the user do differently if they knew this? If the answer it that they would not do any...
The number one thing that you have to realize about technical writing is that people do not read it for its own sake. They read it because they are trying to do something and they need more informa...
Think about the purpose and effect of foreshadowing. If you are walking home and you see a column of smoke rising over your neighbourhood, you will probably rush forward with a lump in your throat ...
All these analytical schemas are interesting, but I don't think you can rely on them for building a story. It is like dissecting a body. An autopsy may tell you what killed them, but it won't bring...
Readers are not hooked by outlandish openings. Readers are hooked by character, story, and setting. You can introduce a character, story, or setting in an outlandish way. (See Steinbeck's introduct...
