Posts by Mark Baker
This is a problem that needs no solution. People know how to skip over quotations and recaps. Indeed, people usually skip over quotations and recaps and only go back to look at them if they find th...
Grammar is to writing as driving a nail is to architecture. Yes, you need the nails to be driven in straight, but it is not what architecture is about. A good writer is, first of all, a good obser...
In my book, Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process, I make a distinction between three domains of markup, the subject, document, and presentation domain. CSS is a presentation domain language. HT...
Have you considered a simple comment system, something like Disqus. There is a certain amount of spam protection built into those systems, you can choose to moderate posts, and people can subscribe...
What do you want a blog for? If you just want to share your day to day life with the world, that's what Facebook and Instagram are for now. People who blog these days are either selling something o...
I wrote a blog post a little while back about what it means for a reader to identify with a protagonist: https://gmbaker.net/avatar-friend-and-shrink-three-modes-of-reader-intimacy/ I identified t...
So having said all that, it turns out that my publisher publishes novellas. https://chrismpress.com/books/magdalen-montague/ This may perhaps be something that small presses, particularly those th...
My information is all of the negative variety, but in all the research I have done over the years on publishers and agents I have never seen one that wanted novellas. The novella always was, I beli...
Well, your teachers were talking rot, as they often do. Though, to be fair, the aim of their teaching was probably not give your the full art of writing, but simply to introduce a little elementary...
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...
The imported content may be a problem in that Google will see it as duplicate content, and Google does not like duplicate content. I'm not sure if the whole site gets actively penalized for the dup...
In addition to what has been said about the ability to follow steps, the same thing would apply to a bunch of individual tips that don't have to be followed in order: Make each one a separate parag...
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...
A big part of the marketing advantage that publishers have is that they have access to this kind of information. This is a problem even for authors going the traditional route, because they are exp...
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...
Write to them an ask. If they have reservations or wish to place limits on their endorsement, they will say so. Write because you want their reply in writing, should a dispute ever arise.
At the point at which the things they are noticing are not germane to the situation they are in. At any given moment, we take note of those things that are relevant to what we are doing or what is ...
Stick them in a file called Snippets. This has one function and one function only: to make it easier to excise all the stuff that does not belong in your story. Tell yourself that this is good stuf...
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that you have to act out how dialogue is spoken. Yes, some author do try indicate every nuance of sound in some character's speech, but most readers find it hig...
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...
Let me suggest that lightheartedness is not a character trait but a response to circumstance. Let me suggest that a lighthearted character is one who expects to get the things they desire, and that...
What happened to the rep scores? They jumped by a bunch.
