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[ { "answer_id": 32474, "author": "Boondoggle", "author_id": 28684, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28684", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>A quick Google search on <code>hebrew remove nikkud</code> gave an answer.</p>\n\n<p>On <a href=\"https://gist.github.com/yakovsh/345a71d841871cc3d375\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Github</a> there's a JavaScript with a live preview <a href=\"https://jsfiddle.net/js0ge7gn/3/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">code</a>. If it's little text you could use the JavaScript either online or download and use it on your pc (save as <code>.js</code>). </p>\n\n<p>The Hebrew charcodes are all between 1425 and 1479 and the nikkud are between 0591 and 05C7.</p>\n\n<p>Python implementation (tested): </p>\n\n<pre><code>import unicodedata\n# nikkud-test.txt is the file you save your text in.\nf= open('nikkud-test.txt','r', encoding='utf-8') \ncontent = f.read()\nnormalized=unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', content)\nno_nikkud=''.join([c for c in normalized if not unicodedata.combining(c)])\nno_nikkud\nf.close()\nf = open('no-nikkud-test.txt','w',encoding='utf-8')\nfw = f.write(no_nikkud)\nf.close()\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>This works very fast.</p>\n\n<p>UPDATED:\nHow to use this script?</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Download <em>Python 3.x.x</em> from the <a href=\"https://www.python.org/downloads/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">python.org</a></li>\n<li>Save your nikkud text to <code>nikkud-test.txt</code> in whatever directory</li>\n<li>From the start menu start your <code>cmd</code> shell/command prompt/terminal.</li>\n<li>Move to directory where you saved your file by typing <code>cd</code> followed by the directory</li>\n<li>type <code>python</code> or open an <code>iPython</code> console.</li>\n<li>copy + paste script</li>\n<li><code>no-nikkud-test.txt</code> will show up in the same directory</li>\n</ol>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>UPDATE without Terminal (Tested with Python 3.5 IDLE and iPython)</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Download <em>Python 3.5</em> or higher from <a href=\"https://www.python.org/downloads/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">python.org</a> </li>\n<li>Save your niqqud text to <code>niqqud.txt</code> in your Documents folder. (Windows / Mac)</li>\n<li>Open IDLE from the Start Menu. (Alternatively, use <a href=\"https://ipython.org/install.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">iPython</a>)</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>Copy and paste the function below:</p>\n\n<pre><code>def hasar_niqqud(source=\"niqqud.txt\"):\n \"\"\"This function removes niqqud vowel diacretics from Hebrew.\n @param source: The source filename with .txt extension.\"\"\"\n import os, unicodedata\n path = os.path.expanduser('~/Documents/'+str(source))\n f= open(path,'r', encoding='utf-8')\n content = f.read()\n normalized=unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', content)\n no_niqqud=''.join([c for c in normalized if not unicodedata.combining(c)])\n f.close()\n path = os.path.expanduser('~/Documents/'+str(source)[:-4]+\"-removed.txt\")\n f = open(path,'w',encoding='utf-8')\n f.write(no_niqqud)\n f.close()\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Then run the function with this code:</p>\n\n<pre><code>hasar_niqqud()\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>That's it! You can find the output in the Documents folder <code>niqqud-removed.txt</code></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36945, "author": "Jonathan Potter", "author_id": 31876, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/31876", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I was looking for the exact same thing. Dug around and found ways to do it outside Word, but really wanted to do this without leaving Word. Did some more reading and discovered the key is to run a find and replace, searching for the vowel characters in the Hebrew Unicode block. I wanted to keep maqqef and sof pasuq, so I had to use three separate ranges (if you don't want those characters, you can simplify this to one search for the whole range 1425-1479). The results are below. If you select text and run the macro, it will only apply to the selection. If you don't have a selection, it will run to end of document. </p>\n\n<pre><code>Sub HebrewDevocalizer()\nWith Selection.Find\n .ClearFormatting\n .Replacement.ClearFormatting\n .Text = \"[\" &amp; ChrW(1425) &amp; \"-\" &amp; ChrW(1469) &amp; \"]\"\n .Replacement.Text = \"\"\n .Forward = True\n .Wrap = wdFindStop\n .Format = False\n .MatchCase = False\n .MatchWholeWord = False\n .MatchKashida = False\n .MatchDiacritics = False\n .MatchAlefHamza = False\n .MatchControl = False\n .MatchAllWordForms = False\n .MatchSoundsLike = False\n .MatchWildcards = True\nEnd With\nSelection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll\n\nWith Selection.Find\n .ClearFormatting\n .Replacement.ClearFormatting\n .Text = \"[\" &amp; ChrW(1471) &amp; \"-\" &amp; ChrW(1474) &amp; \"]\"\n .Replacement.Text = \"\"\n .Forward = True\n .Wrap = wdFindStop\n .Format = False\n .MatchCase = False\n .MatchWholeWord = False\n .MatchKashida = False\n .MatchDiacritics = False\n .MatchAlefHamza = False\n .MatchControl = False\n .MatchAllWordForms = False\n .MatchSoundsLike = False\n .MatchWildcards = True\nEnd With\nSelection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll\n\nWith Selection.Find\n .ClearFormatting\n .Replacement.ClearFormatting\n .Text = \"[\" &amp; ChrW(1476) &amp; \"-\" &amp; ChrW(1479) &amp; \"]\"\n .Replacement.Text = \"\"\n .Forward = True\n .Wrap = wdFindStop\n .Format = False\n .MatchCase = False\n .MatchWholeWord = False\n .MatchKashida = False\n .MatchDiacritics = False\n .MatchAlefHamza = False\n .MatchControl = False\n .MatchAllWordForms = False\n .MatchSoundsLike = False\n .MatchWildcards = True\nEnd With\nSelection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll\nEnd Sub\n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 46490, "author": "Juergen Schoch", "author_id": 40116, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/40116", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In case your list is in Excel you could use this macro (based on the suggestion of Jonathan Potter). Select a range of cells, then execute the macro in VBEditor.</p>\n\n<pre><code>Sub HebrewDevocalizer()\nDim i As Integer\n\n For i = 1425 To 1469\n Selection.Replace What:=ChrW(i), Replacement:=\"\", LookAt:=xlPart, _\n SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, MatchCase:=False, SearchFormat:=False, ReplaceFormat:=False\n Next i\n For i = 1471 To 1474\n Selection.Replace What:=ChrW(i), Replacement:=\"\", LookAt:=xlPart, _\n SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, MatchCase:=False\n Next i\n For i = 1476 To 1479\n Selection.Replace What:=ChrW(i), Replacement:=\"\", LookAt:=xlPart, _\n SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, MatchCase:=False\n Next i\n\nEnd Sub\n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 48873, "author": "Madeleine Isenberg", "author_id": 42033, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42033", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I looked for an App that would provide the nikud (vowels) to words I was using to create a glossary. However, once I had the words in that form, I could no longer sort them (as we can tell from these questions). </p>\n\n<p>However, the same App, <a href=\"https://nakdan.dicta.org.il/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://nakdan.dicta.org.il/</a> also allows the user to select the \"modern Hebrew\" version, and if you click on לחץ כאן (click here) a little dialog box appears. Click on the black box that basically takes you to another version to add vowels, it actually then wipes out whatever vowels you had there. </p>\n\n<p>You may have to play around a bit with it to get the hang of it and/or do it in parts.</p>\n\n<p>Then you can just copy and paste into your spreadsheet in a temporary column to use for sorting. After final sorting, delete that column.</p>\n\n<p>Give that a try for a work-around!</p>\n\n<p>Regards,\nMadeleine</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/32470", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28857/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 32762, "author": "White Eagle", "author_id": 27797, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/27797", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>This is definitely a touching question considering how much time writers spend on their computers. There is Microsoft Word. I love Word, however writing in it is unorganized and messy. If you desperately needed a good spell checker, though, Word is the way to go. You can find it <a href=\"https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/word-2016?cl_vend=bing&amp;cl_ch=sem&amp;cl_camp=290154020&amp;cl_adg=1275433526959278&amp;cl_crtv=79714613000162&amp;cl_kw=microsoft%20word&amp;cl_pub=bing.com&amp;cl_dvt=c&amp;cl_mt=e&amp;cl_gtid=kwd-79714617760096:loc-71149&amp;cl_dim0=V9cXnwAABdPJab4c:20180124004910:s&amp;invsrc=search&amp;OCID=AID620866_SEM_V9cXnwAABdPJab4c:20180124004910:s&amp;s_kwcid=AL!4249!10!79714613000162!79714617760096&amp;ef_id=V9cXnwAABdPJab4c:20180124004910:s\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">here</a>.</p>\n\n<p>I use Scrivener. Scrivener doesn't have the best editing tools, but it is made for writing and it is overall amazing. Organization is a breeze, full screen mode is awesome, and tons of tools are built in (including random name generation). You can find it <a href=\"https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">here</a>.</p>\n\n<p>As a side note, if you are looking for something to jot down ideas, the same people that made Scrivener also made <a href=\"https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Scrapple</a>. I personally haven't used it, but I will probably buy it sometime soon. I currently use <a href=\"https://www.onenote.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">OneNote</a> (also part of Office). There is a free version. With a free mobile app, it is perfect for using when inspiration comes. </p>\n\n<p>For editing, I use <a href=\"https://www.autocrit.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">AutoCrit</a>. It has advanced editing features that help find your writing style problems. It <em>does not</em> help much with grammar. It is based around style. AutoCrit does have a high monthly fee. I got it on sale for winning NaNoWriMo, but I think I pay for it anyways if I hadn't. </p>\n\n<p>Lastly, if you are writing science fiction or fantasy you might need some wacky names. <a href=\"http://crazynamer.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Here</a> is a generator for that. While designed for business names, it works great for crazy names. </p>\n\n<p>In summary, when I work I take notes in OneNote (and probably Scrapple sometime soon), write in Scrivener, and edit in AutoCrit. I use Word primarily as my middle man since I can't directly export from Scrivener to AutoCrit. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 32773, "author": "Blobb", "author_id": 29088, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/29088", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Specialized Writing Software:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.literatureandlatte.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Scrivener</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://dramatica.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Dramatica</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">yWriter</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://ulyssesapp.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Ulysses</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"http://www.papyrusauthor.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Papyrus Autor</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.autorenprogramm.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Patchwork</a> (only in German)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Specialized Screenwriting Software:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.finaldraft.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Final Draft</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.celtx.com/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Celtx</a></li>\n<li>and more on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screenwriting_software</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I can personally highly recommend all of the directly linked software (I don't now about the other screenwriting software listed on the Wikipedia page), and they are all often recommended by other writers (if they use specialized software at all and not MS Word, Open Office / Libre Office Writer, or a plain text editor). That is, to my knowledge this is the best software out there. Which one fits your personal needs best is something that you have to decide by studying the respective websites and testing the demo versions.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p><em>Papyrus Autor is a German software that has been around since 1992 and has become the most widely used writing software among German-speaking authors. Patchwork is a new software from Austria with the richest set of features among all writing software (all of which can be activated or deactivated according to personal needs, so they don't in fact overwhelm) which has been greeted with enthusiastic user reviews. Both come with the best available German spell and grammar check (from Duden, which otherwise is only available as a paid plugin for MS Word or InDesign) as well as with a style analysis devised by German author Andreas Eschbach (and described on his website). I added these two applications to the list for German users, of which there are plenty on this site. I'm not familiar with the English GUI of Papyrus Autor.</em></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 32780, "author": "J.G.", "author_id": 22216, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/22216", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I use something no-one has mentioned, <a href=\"https://www.lyx.org/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">LyX</a>. It's designed for mathematicians and physicists to write documents full of TeX/LaTeX-typeset equations, which is how I happened upon it, but it's much more multi-purpose than that. It can be used to write scripts and, if you know what you're doing, novels. (I've used it for that purpose several times, but first it was how I wrote a PhD thesis.) It has a number of advantages over Word (but these might also be features of other options people have mentioned), such as:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Easy breakdown of document into parts, chapters, sections etc., be they numbered or unnumbered;</li>\n<li>It works out how to position everything for you in a <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">WYSIWYM</a>, not WYSIWYG, format;</li>\n<li>Ability to create invisible \"notes\".</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>But there are disadvantages:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>You write a .lyx file but export from it to another format that can be read without LyX (LyX notes' contents won't show up);</li>\n<li>The WYSIWYM format has some colour settings that, while having no effect on the output, can annoy you as the user unless you spend a few minutes changing them;</li>\n<li>The document's settings may take a bit of customisation to look like a novel (I set the document class to Memoir; if you need any further help, look at the TeX SE).</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>I cannot speak for other programs, but there will be surprisingly long lists of pros and cons for everything, and ultimately the software is less important than your ideas.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 32787, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Personally, after trying (almost) everything, I ended up using Vim. Couldn't be happier with it. However, I can see why only coders use it for writing novels. There is a tremendous learning curve that makes even Scrivener look reasonable. \nSo to the list above, I'd add <a href=\"http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Manuskript</a>. It's an open source clone of Scrivener that focuses less on places to horde research and more on giving outlining tools to the user. When I last used it (November of '17) there wasn't much documentation to support it. I found it intuitive, but I imagine that might have more to do with my familiarity with Scrivener than the UI of Manuskript.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/32761", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/21721/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 33598, "author": "David Vogel", "author_id": 29609, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/29609", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If you have a few exceptional use cases, they should be indicated as such when they occur. </p>\n\n<p>If all other cases relate to a single problem space (user privileges in this example), this should be indicated in an introduction and perhaps reiterated in another major section in case the user skips the intro.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 33599, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>My rule of thumb is \"the right information at the right time\", especially in content that's supposed to be consumed on a topic rather than a chapter/book basis. Sure, this leads to some repetition but with the latest and greatest reuse mechanisms in doc tools it shouldn't be a problem.</p>\n\n<p>I would probably place it in the requirements section of the task topic (if it's a task topic), or state it in a comments/requirements section in a reference-style table or list. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 33600, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If you have to specify it that many times, then it seems to me that I would put the information in an appendix and then for each set of instructions add a marker of some sort (text or an icon) that tells the person what login is needed at that level. For example:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Task 1 [User]\n\n<ul>\n<li>instructions</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li>Task 2 [Superuser]\n\n<ul>\n<li>instructions</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li>Task 3 [Superuser]\n\n<ul>\n<li>instructions</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li>etc</li>\n<li>Appendix: Users\n\n<ul>\n<li>This is how a User logs in</li>\n<li>This is how a Superuser logs in</li>\n</ul></li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Sometimes the docs team could use a snippet of text that is usable in multiple places while only being editable in one. But when that snippet is being used in so many places, I have to wonder if that's the best way.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 33601, "author": "Scribblemacher", "author_id": 30549, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30549", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>Yes, always tell the reader which user to use</h1>\n\n<p>In material like this, there is no way to predict where the reader will start and if they have read any of the preceding material. If they ask themselves \"how do I accomplish X\" and you have a section named \"Doing X\", they're going to skip that other stuff. I've seen this described as the <a href=\"https://everypageispageone.com/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">every page is page one</a> model. It is very real behavior.</p>\n\n<p>Another good reason to always and explicitly tell the reader what user to use is that (if the user is important) there are probably security implications if the reader uses the <em>wrong</em> user account.</p>\n\n<p>If you are writing task-style topics with a prerequisites section, that is a good place to tell the reader which user to use. However, if your content has a lot of code/command snippets, you can also use a code comment. Using your example:</p>\n\n<pre><code># As lessPrivilegedUser\nclustercommand --resursive --restart\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>As a reader, I know <em>I</em> personally would appreciate that attention to detail. It also helps make your documentation safer. If the user is just going through your doc and copy/pasting and running commands blindly, they'll at least see that important note.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 33602, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>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. </p>\n\n<p>As far as the reader is concerned, therefore, Every Page is Page One. There is no rest of the manual. There is only this page. It is all I am looking at, all I am interested in looking at, and all I am going to look at. </p>\n\n<p>If the information I need to complete my task successfully is not on that page, then as far as I am concerned it is not in the documentation. </p>\n\n<p>The DRY doctrine only applies, if it applies at all, to unit that the reader actually uses. For instance, you would never invoke DRY to justify not including a piece of information because it was already in a manual for a different product that you released 10 years ago. DRY can only be applied to the context of use, and the context of use is the page, not the manual that contains the page, but the individual page the reader is looking at. Because that is all they are going to look at. Every Page is Page One. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/33597", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/29874/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 34120, "author": "Kirk", "author_id": 24040, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/24040", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>While you can structure a list within a sentence this way, it's typically frowned upon. The preferred style would be to preempt the list with a complete thought that describes the list which follows it and treat that list as a break between thoughts. If you choose to have a vertical list you're saying it's important enough to be its own element and therefor draw the eye and break up a text. So, while it could be within a sentence, it often isn't and wouldn't be published that way without extremely good cause (or a desire to just muck with convention for art's sake).</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;p&gt;Lots of a text goes here. Perhaps multiple sentances. But I'm about to make a point. And now I'm making it. Here's a list that describes the options:&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;ul&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;Item 1&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;Item 2&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;/ul&gt;\n&lt;p&gt;New paragraph begins here.&lt;/p&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><p>Lots of a text goes here. Perhaps multiple sentances. But I'm about\n to make a point. And now I'm making it. Here's a list that describes\n the options:\n <ul>\n <li>Item 1</li>\n <li>Item 2</li>\n </ul>\n <p>New paragraph begins here.</p></p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 34151, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>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 used. </p>\n\n<p>There are some markup language that will allow you to enter a list as a substructure within a paragraph.</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;p&gt;The school has a vegetable garden in which the children grow\n&lt;ul&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;cabbages,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;onions,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;potatoes, and&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;carrots&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;/ul&gt;\nduring their free time.&lt;/p&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Lightweight markup languages like Markdown, however, don't have an easy way to represent the difference between a list being inside as opposed to after a paragraph. The distinction is a sufficiently subtle one that most authors are probably not going to do it consistently anyway, so might want to avoid formatting that depends on it, or else avoid writing the paragraph in a way that puts the list in the middle. It is usually pretty easy to recast things so that the list comes at the end:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;p&gt;The school has a vegetable garden in which \nthe children can spend their free time growing:\n&lt;ul&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;cabbages,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;onions,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;potatoes, and&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;carrots&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;/ul&gt;\n&lt;/p&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>And once you recast it like this, the difference between the list being in or under the paragraph becomes moot and you can just as easily do this:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;p&gt;The school has a vegetable garden in which \nthe children can spend their free time growing:&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;ul&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;cabbages,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;onions,&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;potatoes, and&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;carrots&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;/ul&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>BTW, when it comes to lists, it is common practice not to carry sentence punctuation over into the list. Think of the list as an alternate form of punctuation. Therefore you should drop the commas and the 'and'. </p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;p&gt;The school has a vegetable garden in which \nthe children can spend their free time growing:&lt;/p&gt;\n&lt;ul&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;cabbages&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;onions&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;potatoes&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;li&gt;carrots&lt;/li&gt;\n&lt;/ul&gt;\n</code></pre>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/34118", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30089/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 35221, "author": "SFWriter", "author_id": 26683, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26683", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>(I don't understand why you are distilling the necessary length down to a sentence - you have all the space you need ... except on twitter.)</p>\n<p>But OK, based on the comments here's how your question reads to me. I might be way off base.:</p>\n<p><em>I would like to be a writer but when I write a sentence, it comes out wrong. Shallow, flat, amateurish. I want something more sophisticated. How do I get there?</em></p>\n<p>Again - I might be off in my interpretation.</p>\n<p><strong>The advice I follow, and give to others, is this:</strong> just get the crappy copy on paper. The first draft will be bad. Expect it to be bad, and write it. Plan for it to be bad. Celebrate having a bad draft.</p>\n<p>It's better than no draft.</p>\n<p>Then, revise. I'm a novice at fiction. I'm on revision 18. This is pathetic! But, the story didn't exist a year ago, and I bet it would hold your interest well enough. It is not yet good enough to query, but way closer than draft ten, which was a far sight better than draft four.</p>\n<p>Revise. Revise revise. No one ever needs to see the crappy copy. First draft can have <em>none</em> of what you specify, and then you can massage it in, add, delete, reorder, etc. Get it to that place you see in your mind.</p>\n<p>Here are some quotes from good authors:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them\nthink you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have\nsincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. –\nSomerset Maugham</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.\n– C. J. Cherryh</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<p>And <a href=\"http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-quotes\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">lots more</a> ...</p>\n<hr />\n<p>ETA:</p>\n<p>Based on examples given, it seems you may be looking at different roles of dialog and narration.</p>\n<p>Dialog is a tricky beast. It must be both natural, and entirely unnatural.</p>\n<p>Every natural dialog I've ever written has been edited so, so heavily to make it work. It ends up unnatural, but it sounds natural. Because, pacing is so important, and natural dialog on the page is often so mundane (=slow).</p>\n<p>Narrative, and action tags for dialog, can help the dialog come out right. These serve their own purpose. Because we want dialog to be natural, it can't convey everything on the written page. Sarcasm, sincerity, unconcern, other emotions - all of these are not communicated by the words but the physical actions or tone of the speaker.</p>\n<p>It's not a matter of making the dialog more appealing. The 'extra words' (narration) constrain the dialog.</p>\n<p>Occasionally something like tone can be implied in dialog rather than stated in narration.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;He's never wrong.&quot;</p>\n<p>&quot;Watch your tone.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This can tell you that the first dialog bit has 'tone.' Sarcasm. But in most cases you need something more overt.</p>\n<p>@Amadeus made a good point many many months back. Among other things, narrative allows time to pass for the reader. So, in the case below:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;He's <em>never</em> wrong.&quot; She said it sulkily, as though perhaps he should\nbe wrong, once in a while, if for no other reason than to understand\nhow she felt every single day.</p>\n<p>&quot;Watch your tone.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The narrative gives the reading brain time to feel out what it is that the first person is thinking and feeling. The reader is not swept along 'too quickly' by dialog. Pacing. Guiding. Making a contract with the reader.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 35224, "author": "Neghie Thervil", "author_id": 30854, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30854", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>You've provided very little information, so I will approach this like a cooking reality show. You've given me three ingredients/words to use: coughing, trembling, and crying. So let's make something out of them.</p>\n\n<p>If I'm correct in interpreting your question, you simply want to <strong>dress up your sentences, so they convey mood, action and perhaps some emotion.</strong> In essence, you want your sentences to do more than just <strong><em>say</em></strong> what is happening, you want to show-make us feel what is happening which is what good writing is supposed to do in the first place...so this does require some practice. </p>\n\n<p>Using your example of a man sitting in a cell and the (3) words you've provided, you can easily construct complex sentences that does some heavy literary lifting.</p>\n\n<p>Before we dive in, you'll want to keep three things in mind:</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol>\n <li><p>There is no \"limit\" (within reason) to how long your sentences have to be, but <strong>only use the necessary amount of words</strong> to say what you need\n to convey or else you'll fall into bad purple prose territory.</p></li>\n <li><p><strong>Use punctuation to your advantage</strong> as it can control pacing and flow</p></li>\n <li><p><strong>Watch your sentence structure</strong>, one misplaced pronoun, adjective or comma and you've written gibberish.</p></li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 1:Introduce some danger</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>He was <strong>trembling</strong> uncontrollably, too much to <strong>cry</strong>, and he stifled his\n <strong>coughs</strong> with his fists so he wouldn't wake his roommate whose eyes were as hard and cold as the walls surrounding him.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In this example, after I used the words you provided, I added an element of danger, a real threat in a place like a jail cell. I don't know what your character's situation looks like, but consider using his surroundings to remind us that he's in a bad situation that can turn worse at any moment.</p>\n\n<p>I've also peppered in a simile:</p>\n\n<pre><code>...his roommate whose eyes were as hard and cold as the walls surrounding him...\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Similes can be powerful tools when trying to help your reader visualize a scene.</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 2: Play with Punctuation</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><strong>The tears finally stopped coming</strong>, but now, he couldn't stop <strong>trembling</strong>\n as he <strong>coughed</strong> violently, wrapped tightly up under the short,\n scratchy blanket they provided everyone upon entry.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In this example, I played with punctuation, specifically with commas. I like how they control the pacing, and how the ideas seem to unfold slowly. Tends to build tension without anything really happening.</p>\n\n<p>You'll also notice, I inferred he was crying in this example, instead of simply saying it. You could do the same with \ntrembling: change it to shaking, or... \ncoughing: changing it to choking on the air around him. </p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 3: Say It!</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><em>Stop your crying</em>, he coached himself, trembling and bracing himself through violent bouts of coughing brought upon by the dusty blanket he had carefully cocooned himself into; <em>they'll have to pry me out of here</em>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>He's actually thinking it rather than saying it in this example, but it can be done either way. I've used dialogue to introduce crying into the sentence.</p>\n\n<p>This version also focuses more on his mood, which is fear considering he's wrapped tightly under a dusty blanket that is making him cough. Cough in this case is doing some double duty, giving us some action and really giving us a good idea of the mood.</p>\n\n<p>That's all I've got for now. No more soup for you!</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<p>Suggestions:</p>\n\n<p><strong>KEEP A LIST:</strong> </p>\n\n<p>I'm assuming you read. When you do, take notes of all the complex sentences that stand out to you and jot them down on an accessible list you can reference from time to time.\nBefore I write, I usually look at these lists and they help with the creative writing process a great deal as I can immediately apply some of the strategies.</p>\n\n<p><strong>PRACTICE</strong></p>\n\n<p>Spend time practicing this very exercise you've inadvertently devised. Come up with your own three sentences and see which one sounds the best.</p>\n\n<p>So go on...and get cookin'!</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/35139", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30912/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 35221, "author": "SFWriter", "author_id": 26683, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26683", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>(I don't understand why you are distilling the necessary length down to a sentence - you have all the space you need ... except on twitter.)</p>\n<p>But OK, based on the comments here's how your question reads to me. I might be way off base.:</p>\n<p><em>I would like to be a writer but when I write a sentence, it comes out wrong. Shallow, flat, amateurish. I want something more sophisticated. How do I get there?</em></p>\n<p>Again - I might be off in my interpretation.</p>\n<p><strong>The advice I follow, and give to others, is this:</strong> just get the crappy copy on paper. The first draft will be bad. Expect it to be bad, and write it. Plan for it to be bad. Celebrate having a bad draft.</p>\n<p>It's better than no draft.</p>\n<p>Then, revise. I'm a novice at fiction. I'm on revision 18. This is pathetic! But, the story didn't exist a year ago, and I bet it would hold your interest well enough. It is not yet good enough to query, but way closer than draft ten, which was a far sight better than draft four.</p>\n<p>Revise. Revise revise. No one ever needs to see the crappy copy. First draft can have <em>none</em> of what you specify, and then you can massage it in, add, delete, reorder, etc. Get it to that place you see in your mind.</p>\n<p>Here are some quotes from good authors:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them\nthink you were born that way. – Ernest Hemingway</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have\nsincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. –\nSomerset Maugham</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.\n– C. J. Cherryh</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>.</p>\n<p>And <a href=\"http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-quotes\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">lots more</a> ...</p>\n<hr />\n<p>ETA:</p>\n<p>Based on examples given, it seems you may be looking at different roles of dialog and narration.</p>\n<p>Dialog is a tricky beast. It must be both natural, and entirely unnatural.</p>\n<p>Every natural dialog I've ever written has been edited so, so heavily to make it work. It ends up unnatural, but it sounds natural. Because, pacing is so important, and natural dialog on the page is often so mundane (=slow).</p>\n<p>Narrative, and action tags for dialog, can help the dialog come out right. These serve their own purpose. Because we want dialog to be natural, it can't convey everything on the written page. Sarcasm, sincerity, unconcern, other emotions - all of these are not communicated by the words but the physical actions or tone of the speaker.</p>\n<p>It's not a matter of making the dialog more appealing. The 'extra words' (narration) constrain the dialog.</p>\n<p>Occasionally something like tone can be implied in dialog rather than stated in narration.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;He's never wrong.&quot;</p>\n<p>&quot;Watch your tone.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>This can tell you that the first dialog bit has 'tone.' Sarcasm. But in most cases you need something more overt.</p>\n<p>@Amadeus made a good point many many months back. Among other things, narrative allows time to pass for the reader. So, in the case below:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;He's <em>never</em> wrong.&quot; She said it sulkily, as though perhaps he should\nbe wrong, once in a while, if for no other reason than to understand\nhow she felt every single day.</p>\n<p>&quot;Watch your tone.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The narrative gives the reading brain time to feel out what it is that the first person is thinking and feeling. The reader is not swept along 'too quickly' by dialog. Pacing. Guiding. Making a contract with the reader.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 35224, "author": "Neghie Thervil", "author_id": 30854, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30854", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>You've provided very little information, so I will approach this like a cooking reality show. You've given me three ingredients/words to use: coughing, trembling, and crying. So let's make something out of them.</p>\n\n<p>If I'm correct in interpreting your question, you simply want to <strong>dress up your sentences, so they convey mood, action and perhaps some emotion.</strong> In essence, you want your sentences to do more than just <strong><em>say</em></strong> what is happening, you want to show-make us feel what is happening which is what good writing is supposed to do in the first place...so this does require some practice. </p>\n\n<p>Using your example of a man sitting in a cell and the (3) words you've provided, you can easily construct complex sentences that does some heavy literary lifting.</p>\n\n<p>Before we dive in, you'll want to keep three things in mind:</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <ol>\n <li><p>There is no \"limit\" (within reason) to how long your sentences have to be, but <strong>only use the necessary amount of words</strong> to say what you need\n to convey or else you'll fall into bad purple prose territory.</p></li>\n <li><p><strong>Use punctuation to your advantage</strong> as it can control pacing and flow</p></li>\n <li><p><strong>Watch your sentence structure</strong>, one misplaced pronoun, adjective or comma and you've written gibberish.</p></li>\n </ol>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 1:Introduce some danger</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>He was <strong>trembling</strong> uncontrollably, too much to <strong>cry</strong>, and he stifled his\n <strong>coughs</strong> with his fists so he wouldn't wake his roommate whose eyes were as hard and cold as the walls surrounding him.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In this example, after I used the words you provided, I added an element of danger, a real threat in a place like a jail cell. I don't know what your character's situation looks like, but consider using his surroundings to remind us that he's in a bad situation that can turn worse at any moment.</p>\n\n<p>I've also peppered in a simile:</p>\n\n<pre><code>...his roommate whose eyes were as hard and cold as the walls surrounding him...\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Similes can be powerful tools when trying to help your reader visualize a scene.</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 2: Play with Punctuation</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><strong>The tears finally stopped coming</strong>, but now, he couldn't stop <strong>trembling</strong>\n as he <strong>coughed</strong> violently, wrapped tightly up under the short,\n scratchy blanket they provided everyone upon entry.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In this example, I played with punctuation, specifically with commas. I like how they control the pacing, and how the ideas seem to unfold slowly. Tends to build tension without anything really happening.</p>\n\n<p>You'll also notice, I inferred he was crying in this example, instead of simply saying it. You could do the same with \ntrembling: change it to shaking, or... \ncoughing: changing it to choking on the air around him. </p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>WORD SOUP SAMPLE 3: Say It!</h2>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><em>Stop your crying</em>, he coached himself, trembling and bracing himself through violent bouts of coughing brought upon by the dusty blanket he had carefully cocooned himself into; <em>they'll have to pry me out of here</em>.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>He's actually thinking it rather than saying it in this example, but it can be done either way. I've used dialogue to introduce crying into the sentence.</p>\n\n<p>This version also focuses more on his mood, which is fear considering he's wrapped tightly under a dusty blanket that is making him cough. Cough in this case is doing some double duty, giving us some action and really giving us a good idea of the mood.</p>\n\n<p>That's all I've got for now. No more soup for you!</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<p>Suggestions:</p>\n\n<p><strong>KEEP A LIST:</strong> </p>\n\n<p>I'm assuming you read. When you do, take notes of all the complex sentences that stand out to you and jot them down on an accessible list you can reference from time to time.\nBefore I write, I usually look at these lists and they help with the creative writing process a great deal as I can immediately apply some of the strategies.</p>\n\n<p><strong>PRACTICE</strong></p>\n\n<p>Spend time practicing this very exercise you've inadvertently devised. Come up with your own three sentences and see which one sounds the best.</p>\n\n<p>So go on...and get cookin'!</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/35141", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30913/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 35271, "author": "Neghie Thervil", "author_id": 30854, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30854", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Rape scenes require an expert hand or you could be writing a rape fantasy, which is where I think people tend to get in trouble. The trick is, to focus less on the act, and more on the horrific scenario. </p>\n\n<p>I think Steig Larson handled this subject well in his best seller, 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'. In chapter 13, he takes us through a vivid rape scene, which is actually the 2nd assault in the book. Although you can imagine what has happened, there is nothing offensive about the way he describes the incident.</p>\n\n<p>So let's break it down. I'm assuming you're familiar with the story, if not check out a brief synopsis here: <a href=\"https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/g/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/book-summary\" rel=\"noreferrer\">The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Synopsis</a>.</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>MOOD</h2>\n\n<p>At the point where the main character Salander goes to see Bjurman's (the antagonist/rapist) home, she is there to hurt him for a previous assault. Unfortunately, she already knows something is off by the time he opens the door.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"The plan began to go wrong, almost from the start. Bjurman was wearing\n a bathrobe when he opened the door to his apartment. He was cross at\n her arriving late and motioned her brusquely inside...</p>\n \n <p>\"Haven't you learned to tell the time?\" Bjurman siad. Salander did not\n reply.\" </p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The author goes into a few details of what she's wearing and goes into Bjurman's mood a little further.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"Come on\" Bjurman said in a friendlier tone. He put his arm around her\n shoulders and led her down a hall into the apartment's interior. <em>No\n small talk.</em> There was no doubt as to what services Salander was\n expected to perform.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>For the most part, Larson told us to expect that something really bad is about to happen. You can anticipate it as he pretty much tells you </p>\n\n<pre><code>The plan began to go wrong, almost from the start.\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>And he proceeds to take us through Bjurman's mood swings...first annoyed and then creepy. Taking her to the bedroom is a good indication of his intentions and expectations. You know she's not happy about the situation.</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>THE SETTING</h2>\n\n<p>In most cases, you should use the setting to your advantage. Larson does a great job at making something as intimate and cozy as a bedroom seem like a dangerous, unforgiving space. He describes the room in detail so we get a feel of what she's seeing:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>She took a quick look around. Bachelor furnishings. A double bed with\n a high bedstead of stainless steel. A low chest of drawers that also\n functioned as a bedside table. Beside lamps with muted lighting. A\n wardrobe with a mirror along one side. A cane chair and a small desk\n in the corner next to door. He took her by the and led her to the bed.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>By itself, the room doesn't have any sinister qualities, but in context, says a lot. <code>Bachelor furnishings...high bedstead of stainless steel</code>\nYou can read some symbolism into that if you want: <em>No one else will be there to save her in this cold space.</em></p>\n\n<p>Either way, we get a good sense that this guy probably doesn't get any female visitors other than the ones he forces there through coercion. This helps heighten the possibility that bad things are going to happen. By this time, we're wondering...would he? </p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>THE DIALOGUE</h2>\n\n<p>Larson uses dialogue to bring us into Salander's frame of mind. We know she doesn't want to do what he's expecting. They go back and forth a little as she simply asks him for money she knows he won't give her until he gets what he wants. Knowing that he has so much control over her financial welfare puts her in a position of weakness.</p>\n\n<p>Through dialogue, we get a sense of his perverted power trip.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"Tell me what you need the money for this time. More computer\n accessories?\" \"Food\" she said...</p>\n \n <p>...\"Have you thought about what I said last time?\" \"About what?\"</p>\n \n <p>\"Lisbeth, don't act any more stupid than you are. I want us to be good\n friends and to help each other out.\" She said nothing. ...Did you like\n our grown-up game last time?\"<br>\n \"No.\" He raised his eyebrows.<br>\n \"Lisbeth, don't be foolish.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>If you're not creeped out by this guy by now, you've got issues. Through dialogue alone, Larson paints out Bjurman's to be a vile and disgusting human being. You hate him, even before he carries out the deed. She's stalling, finding every way possible to not go through with his demand, but she knows he's got her over a barrel.</p>\n\n<p>Consider stressing the vulnerability and hopelessness of your characters in this moment.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <blockquote>\n <p>...\"I want my money. What do you want me to do?\" she says. \n \"You know what I want.\" He grabbed her shoulder and pulled her towards the bed.</p>\n </blockquote>\n \n <p>\"Wait,\" Salander said hastily. She gave him a resigned look and then\n nodded curtly. She took off her rucksack and leather jacket and rivet and looked around... </p>\n \n <p>\"Wait\", she said once more, in a tone as if to say that she was trying\n to talk sense into him. \"I don't want to have to suck your d*** every\n time I need money.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Again, tension is heightened and we know Salander has reached her end. She's not having it. From here, Larson takes us through the actual assault.</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<p><strong>THE ACTION</strong></p>\n\n<p>This is where you want to tread carefully. There's a fine line between writing a graphic scene and being graphic. You don't want to focus on the actual rape (as in penetration, ect). Everything up to that point can be in great detail.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>The experession on Bjurman's face suddenly changed. He slapped her\n hard. Salander opened her eyes wide, but before she could react, he\n grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her on the bed. The violence\n caught her by surprise. When she tried to turn over, he pressed her\n down on the bed and straddled her.</p>\n \n <p>\"Like the time before, she was no match for him in terms of physical\n strength. Her only chance for fighting back was if she could hurt him\n by scratching his eyes or using some sort of weapon. But her planned\n scenario had already gone to hell...<br>\n <em>Shit,</em> she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt. She realised with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth. She heard him open\n the dresser next to the bed...\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>He proceeds to tear off her clothes and stuff her mouth so she doesn't scream.</p>\n\n<p>The actual assault is summed up into one sentence:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"Then she felt an excruciating pain...\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>By the time he writes this, we don't need to know anymore details other than the fact that he followed through with his assault.</p>\n\n<p>The scene ends there until he picks up again which brings us to our final example:</p>\n\n<p>-</p>\n\n<h2>THE EMOTIONS</h2>\n\n<p>Again, since most of the drama was placed on what happened before the assault, Larson had to spend little time with describing anything having to deal with the act. He was able to skim over it and let our imaginations do the rest.</p>\n\n<p>What he does after the scene is something you can also incorporate to really bring home the gravity of the assault, by describing the mood- her/their emotions after the act.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>\"Salander was allowed to put on her clothes. It was 4:00 on Saturday\n morning. She picked up her leather jacket and rucksack and hobbed to\n the front door, where he was waiting for her, showered and neatly\n dressed. He gave a checque for 2,500 kronor.... </p>\n \n <p>She crossed the threshold, out of the apartment, and turned to face\n him. Her body looked fragile and her face was swollen from crying, and\n he almost recoiled when he met her eyes. Never in his life had he seen\n such naked, smouldering hatred.\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><strong>EXERCISE</strong></p>\n\n<p>Think about how your characters might feel when it's done. They could go through a number of emotions beyond anger that you can get creative with: numbness, shock, pain, fear.\nWhat kind of emotions or actions will you give your characters to really help us feel as strongly as they do? You can really spend some time here and the reader will appreciate it. No one gets over an assault without a long period of dread.</p>\n\n<p>So, I've taken a long way to say, you can write about rape as long as you place the focus on the right places, mood, setting, dialogue, actions leading up to the act and finally focusing on emotions.</p>\n\n<p>I'm going to stop typing now.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 35272, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Personally I don't find what you have described more difficult or problematic than any other kind of cruelty or violence in fiction.</p>\n\n<p>I do not think that different acts of violence – rape, torture, assault, childhood neglect, etc. – can be ordered according to how \"bad\" they are for the victim or how \"evil\" the perpetrator has been. There are persons who shake off rape, and there are persons who are broken by a slap to the face – it all depens on the personality of the victim, their resilience, the circumstances of the violence, the person of the perpetrator, and so on. No rape is like any other, and rape isn't worse than any other kind of violence.</p>\n\n<p>What I do see is that we (in the West) live in a culture, where sexual violence against women has been stylized into this ultimate evil, and there is an unspoken – but vehemently enforced – rule that only rape victims can and may speak of it.</p>\n\n<p>For that reason – and for that reason alone – I would advise you to avoid that topic if you don't want to compromise your reputation and your career as a writer.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>From a neutral standpoint, there is nothing wrong with what you attempt to write, except maybe the suggestion that one of the rape victims enjoyed the rape. That happens, but usually on a physical level alone. Some rape victims cannot help but being physically aroused, while at the same time they abhor what is happening (and how their body reacts to it).</p>\n\n<p>Women who truly enjoy being raped are exceedingly rare, and I would definitely avoid such an insinuation.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 54064, "author": "Stef", "author_id": 47857, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/47857", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I won't discuss the actual technical aspect of how to write about rape; but I would like to address one specific point from your setting: <strong>the mind-control</strong>.</p>\n<p>Is it relevant to the story that the victims were raped by their mind-controlled friend?</p>\n<p>Rape is, unfortunately, very common in the real world. So common that you most likely know someone in your close entourage who has been raped, even if they haven't told you about it. But there is one thing that rapists are not: they are not innocent. They are not mind-controlled. With the mind-control in your story, you are putting your rape victims in a very awkward situation where they are not allowed to be resentful towards their rapist, because he was mind-controlled and thus isn't the &quot;real&quot; rapist.</p>\n<p>This makes me particularly uneasy because in the real world, <em>rape victims are often told that they were not really raped</em> and that their rapist is not really guilty. A woman who is raped by her husband will be told by her own family that this isn't really rape, since they were married. A victim raped during their first date with someone they met on a dating site like Tinder will be told by the police that they were not really victim of a rape, because they were implicitly giving consent by going on that date. Even a victim raped by a stranger will be told that it wasn't really rape because the victim &quot;provoked it by wearing sexy clothes&quot;.</p>\n<p>This is the sad reality of today. Rape is common. Rapists are given excuses, and the horror of rape is minimized. Successfully filing a complaint for rape is actually pretty difficult in many countries.</p>\n<p>Being raped is a traumatic experience; being told by the police, or your own family, or society in general, that the rape did not really happen is a betrayal and makes the whole thing even worse to live with.</p>\n<p>Now, in your story, you want protagonist A to be mind-controlled by antagonist C into raping protagonist B. In the abstract, this means that both A and B are victims of the rape, and the real rapist is C. But this is a very confusing situation, especially for B, which was physically raped by A but is not allowed to call A a rapist since A was mind-controlled. Rape is already horrible enough in real-life; and already complicated enough to write about; do you need the added confusion of the mind-control? Do you feel confident you can write this without making your readers feel like your message is &quot;A is a rapist but rapists are not really criminals and should be forgiven&quot;?</p>\n<p>The closest equivalent to mind-control that we have in real life is abuse of substances. Would you argue that a rapist under the influence of alcohol or drugs is not really a rapist, because they did not have full control of their actions? I bet not. But do you feel confident that you can write about the mind-controlled rape without making that analogy?</p>\n<p>Note that mind-control is kind of a form of rape in itself; you can write about how B was physically raped by an antagonist; you can write about how A was mind-controlled by an antagonist; it's the combo &quot;B was raped by a mind-controlled A&quot; which is super-hard to write about.</p>\n<p>Finally, if you really insist on mind-control+rape, I advise you to read novel <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion_Comfort\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Carrion Confort</a> by author Dan Simmons. It features a lot of mind-control, and rape, written by an experienced writer. But even in that book, no one is mind-controlled into raping someone else. The mind-controllers are the rapists, and the mind-controlled are the victims; it's as simple as that.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62856, "author": "Tim", "author_id": 55992, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/55992", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This question is years old, and by putting my 2 cents in, I might indirectly activate the neurons of folks browsing and finding it at the surface again. But to the accusations posted by some fellow that were isolated to a chat that is now frozen, 1stly I don't find the intent confusing or morally culpable at all. Nobody is being &quot;punished&quot;. An evil creature or force is taking satisfaction that it feels is deserved, when everyone in the situation knows that it's wrong. Nobody reading the scene is going to take moral lessons from an evil spirit. 2nd, Sally's enjoyment - whatever form that takes - is balanced by her feelings of guilt, which is a possible symptom of RTS. Guilt is something the victimized have to work through or seek therapy for, for the obvious implication. And any physical enjoyment would be involuntary. Only their captor is happy, and from the barebones explanation given in the OP, I find him/it excruciatingly unsympathetic. Exceedingly simple.</p>\n<p>I don't know how far along original poster is, or whether you've ditched this idea. But have you also considered that the evil being might decide to possess Jane or Sally to cause even more, or alternate, trauma? Perhaps act out rage that they might feel directly toward John if he were not mind-controlled? Perhaps the creature holds John in place to be helpless toward its rage? The whole scene then comes across as intentionally warped facsimile of the human interactions that dictate such events in the absence of the evil creature. I think if that happened, everyone would be emotionally tired after the nightmare, too. Also be careful when thinking about how the story progresses, and how involved they'll each be with events that come after their torment at the hands of, well, some kind of Evil Dead spirit. I could see this easily causing scars that would distance the three heroes from each other. For a long time. They may, or may not, be able to reconcile with the pain and move past it. Adding in magical or supernatural factors like mind control can make the recovery process even more unpredictable. One or more of the heroes could be motivated to reunite to destroy or seal the evil that ruined their lives, or could want to run away and leave everything and everyone behind, to put as much distance between themselves and reminders of the pain. I guess it depends on what's at stake.</p>\n<p>For everything else, I believe that the highest-voted answer by the fellow who gave an example analysis of a scene from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the most comprehensive, and perfect.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/35265", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23083/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 35998, "author": "GGx", "author_id": 28942, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28942", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Other writers on here may pitch in with a different answer but I know of no such term.</p>\n\n<p>You can Google:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Novels \"first person\" \"present tense\"</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>and get results like:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/first-person-present-tense\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/first-person-present-tense</a></p>\n\n<p>But I don't know that any specific term exists. One describes Point of View and one describes Tense, two completely different things that aren't encompassed under one umbrella as far as I'm aware.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36002, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Your examples show a narrative with <strong>mixed first- and second-person narration</strong>.</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<h3>Second-person narration</h3>\n\n<p>But let's clear up second-person narration first.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Second person narrative is what it is called when the main character is being addressed directly. It is marked by frequent use of the word \"you.\" (Chris Sunami)</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>A clear example of pure second-person narration is <em>Bright Lights Big City</em> by Jay McInerney which begins:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>The novel continues to be told firmly in the second-person. (Go to Amazon and read the first two chapters in the preview to get a feel for what second-person narrative can be.)</p>\n\n<h3>Your examples</h3>\n\n<p>Now that we know the difference between third- (\"He went ...\"), first- (\"I went ...\"), and second-person narration (\"You went ...\"), let us analyze your examples.</p>\n\n<p>Your example shows a mixed perspective. There are two characters here, the one narrating from a first-person perspective and the other person, addressed in the second person, who is being asked and who answers.</p>\n\n<p>It is important to note that in your examples the second person is <em>not the reader!</em> The reader does not take part in the story. The narrator can <em>address</em> the reader (\"Dear reader, ...\"), but the reader cannot act in the story. In your example, the \"you\" takes an active part in the story: \"You think about it for a while and then you tell me you are hungry and that you first want to get some lunch.\" The reader cannot tell the author that they are hungry. So this \"you\" cannot be the reader.</p>\n\n<p>I don't know how this story continues. It could be that the first-person narrator steps back from the story completely and tells the adventures of the second-person viewpoint character (\"you\"), turning this into a second-person narration. Or it could be that the second-person character sits down over lunch and remains there while the first-person viewpoint character goes on an adventure, turning it into a first-person narration. Currently it is a mixed viewpoint narration, and it could well be that both the narrator and the audience go on an adventure together.</p>\n\n<h3>Narrative instances</h3>\n\n<p>However that may be, the general schema for a narration is this:</p>\n\n<pre><code> author reader\n | ^\n | |\n (writes) (reads)\n | |\n v | real world\n---------------------------------------------------------------------\n narrator audience &lt;----+ \"frame\" fictional world\n | ^ |\n | | |\n(narrates) (hears) may or may not be identical\n | | |\n v | |\n1st-person 2nd-person |\nviewpoint and/or viewpoint &lt;---+ \"story\"\ncharacter character\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>The <strong>author</strong> writes the book in the real world. In the book, the story is told by the <strong>narrator</strong>. The narrator may or may not explicitly appear in the book. If he appears, it can be in a framing narrative (such as someone telling a story to an audience or someone remembering his past), as the protagonist (who narrates the story as he lives it), or as a side character (who observes the events from within the story, for example as a companion to the protagonist or as the antagonist). The <strong>viewpoint character</strong> is a part of the story, either as its protagonist or as a side character. The viewpoint character can be identical to the narrator (\"I went ...\"), to the audience (\"You went ...\"), or a different person (\"He went ...\"). Like the narrator, the <strong>audience</strong> can explicitly appear in the narrative (as a second-person viewpoint character or as the listener in a framing narrative) or he can be implied. When the narrator addresses a reader (\"Dear reader ...\"), in fiction this \"reader\" is not the real world reader of the book, but the audience: an instance of the text. (Only in non-fiction does the author actually address the reader directly. In non-fiction there usually is no narrator and audience [\"I'll explain to you how to bake cake. You take a cup of flour ...\"].)</p>\n\n<h3>Examples to explain the narrative instances</h3>\n\n<p>In your examples, the \"I\" is the narrator and the \"you\" is the audience. Let us look at some other examples to hopefully explain the narrative instances better:</p>\n\n<p>An author writes a story, in which a storyteller sits down with some children and tells them a tale. The storyteller is the narrator of the tale, and the children are the audience. Both are fictional characters inside the framing narrative, and both do not take part in the story that the storyteller/narrator tells. You, the reader, read the book. The storyteller will address the children with \"you\" and speak of himself as \"I\":</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Listen, children, <strong>I</strong> am going to tell <strong>you</strong> a story.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>In that example, the \"you\" refers to the audience (the children) <em>not</em> the reader, but both narrator and audience are not part of the story.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Listen, children, <strong>I</strong> am going to tell <strong>you</strong> a story. There once was a man and <strong>he</strong> ...</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Now we can change this book so that the narrator tells <em>his own</em> story to the children. He will tell the story in the first person, and the \"you\" is still the audience, and neither the reader nor a character in the story. (And the narrator is not the protagonist either! He tells his own story, but looking back on it, so there is a temporal difference between the narrator and the protagonist.)</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Listen, children, <em>today</em> <strong>I</strong> am going to tell <strong>you</strong> a story. <em>Yesterday</em> <strong>I</strong> went to ...</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>But now we can go a step further and imagine that the narrator, on August 31st, 1953, tells the children the story of how he <em>and the children</em> went to Coney Island on August 30th, 1953 (and you write about that and I read it). Then, both the \"I\" and \"you\" are characters in the story <em>as well as</em> characters in the framing narrative. They are both protagonists – a first-person and a second-person protagonist – in a <strong>mixed first- and second-person narration</strong>.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Listen, children, <strong>I</strong> am going to tell <strong>you</strong> how we went to Coney Island and <strong>you</strong> ran away and <strong>I</strong> had to search for you.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>And of course you can leave the framing narrative away, and then we have an example similar to yours, where the narrator and first-person viewpoint character are identical and the audience and second-person viewpoint character are identical as well:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Yesterday we went to Coney Island and <strong>you</strong> ran away and <strong>I</strong> had to search for you. You all cried, because you were afraid, but when I came, you smiled, because I brought you ice cream. Then we got on the bus and rode home.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h3>Difference between mixed first-and second person narration and first-person narration</h3>\n\n<p>The previous example (and your examples) are <em>not</em> first-person narration! <em>The following</em> is first-person narration:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Yesterday I went to Coney Island with the kids and they ran away and I had to search for them.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h3>Mixed first- and third person narration is rare</h3>\n\n<p>Whether it is <em>mixed</em> first- and third-person narration will depend on whether we have a head-hopping narrative in which the third-person has its own viewpoint (with an internal view of the third-person character: \"I thought/felt ..., and she thought/felt ...\"; this is rare and generally considered bad writing) or merely a side character (with only the first-person viewpoint character's outside view of them: \"I looked at her and wondered what she thought.\"; this is common first-person narration).</p>\n\n<hr>\n\n<h3>Tense</h3>\n\n<p>There are no different terms for second-person or mixed narratives in different tenses. You could say: mixed first- and second-person narrative in past tense. But that is not a term but merely descriptive.</p>\n\n<p>Different kinds of <a href=\"https://www.grammarly.com/blog/first-second-and-third-person/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">narration</a> can be distinguished by point of view – that's what you are asking about –, voice, and time. They are all explained in the Wikipedia article on <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration\" rel=\"noreferrer\">narration</a>.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36087, "author": "hszmv", "author_id": 25666, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25666", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This would be an Epistolary-First Person, where the narrative voice has direct first hand experience in the story and are relating the facts to the reader who is personified in some way in the story. It was famously used in a number of classical horror stories. Dracula was a series of letters addressed to various characters that the reader was somehow allowed to read (either they played the recipient or they were reading a historical document) as was Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Frankenstein was told by the titular doctor to a person who gives him room for the night on his quest to stop the titular monster. It's basically him explaining why he's so far from home. Watson, in Sherlock Holmes serves this role by documenting Sherlock's adventures and his experience with the man.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/35997", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/31267/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 36185, "author": "August Canaille", "author_id": 25629, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25629", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Because “certainly.”, is incorrect. It’s either a period or a comma—not both.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36189, "author": "Boondoggle", "author_id": 28684, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28684", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Stick with either the American or the British way for dealing with punctuation around quotations marks.</p>\n\n<p>American style puts commas and periods within double quotations marks (<a href=\"https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">style.mla.org</a>; <a href=\"http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around-quotation-marks.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">blog.apastyle.org</a>): </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>“Certainly,” she replied cheerfully and vanished.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Using a period within the quotation marks would indicate an end of the sentence in American style. That's why Scrivener is auto-capitalizing.</p>\n\n<p>British style puts commas and periods outside single quotation marks: </p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>'Certainly', she replied cheerfully and vanished.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36213, "author": "Jason Bassford", "author_id": 30561, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30561", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I won't repeat what's already been said in terms of what you're typing being a mistake in punctuation.</p>\n\n<p>But what you <em>can</em> do (although I would advise against it since it's helping to identify a problem) is to turn off Scrivener's <em>Fix capitalization of sentences</em> option, under the <strong>Corrections > Auto-Capitalization</strong> section. (On the Windows 3 beta anyway.)</p>\n\n<p>That would stop the kind of correction you've identified from happening. However, it would also stop it from automatically capitalizing the first letter in any sentence that's typed in lowercase.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62933, "author": "Erk", "author_id": 10826, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10826", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The rules for punctuating <em>quoted</em> dialog differ with culture. For instance, in Swedish it's:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;However&quot;, she replied, &quot;I don't think this is wrong.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>(I.e. same as British but with double quotes... or in fact, single quotes and <code>»</code>…<code>«</code> can also be used with the punctuation in the same places.)</p>\n<p>Scrivener understands these variants just fine. It seems capitalization is mainly triggered by periods, exclamation marks, and question marks.</p>\n<p>If your culture does advocate using both periods and commas, you can always disable &quot;Fix capitalization of sentences&quot; in the section &quot;Auto-Correction&quot; in &quot;Scrivener &gt; Preferences &gt; Corrections&quot;. But then you'll have to keep track of the capitalization of sentences on your own (something at least I do most of the time anyway...)</p>\n<p>Further reading (for English quotations and punctuations):</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/does-punctuation-go-inside-or-outside-quotation-marks/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">Does Punctuation Go Inside Or Outside Of Quotation Marks?</a></li>\n<li><a href=\"https://style.mla.org/the-placement-of-a-comma-or-period-after-a-quotation/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">The Placement of a Comma or Period after a Quotation</a></li>\n</ul>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/36184", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26179/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 36195, "author": "GGx", "author_id": 28942, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28942", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Get The Screenwriter’s Bible, it's the go-to for questions like this.</p>\n\n<p>I've only studied screenwriting (I'm a novelist) and I've never sold one. But I would argue that you are trying to direct the scene, which is a no-no with screenwriting. Directors don't like to be told how to shoot their scenes.</p>\n\n<p>Unless you have some <strong>absolutely crucial</strong> reason for why their lips must not be visible in this scene, I would write it like:</p>\n\n<pre><code>A grassy field extends to the horizon. In the distance, Bill and Ben ride quad bikes. \n\n BEN \n Dude, this is awesome! \n\n BILL \n I'm pooping my pants, man, quad bikes scare the crap out of me.\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>It's up to the director (and dictated by a number of factors like, the terrain of the location, the camera equipment available, etc. etc.) to decide how your scene is shot and whether to film them at a distance and use voice-overs or pan in for a close up.</p>\n\n<p>But if you have good reason for directing how your scene should be shot, it may be worth editing your question to include that information.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36197, "author": "robertcday", "author_id": 31570, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/31570", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is pretty much the same as asking how you can tell what people are saying behind your back. You can't hear what they're saying because they're too far away (unless they are shouting - which is, of course, a possibility in your scenario) and you can't see their lips to be able to read them.</p>\n\n<p>There are a couple of ways that you can find out what was said:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Someone who took part in the conversation tells you about it later</li>\n<li>Someone who overheard the conversation (a little bird) recounts it to you.</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Translating this into your scenario:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>They shout (whoop, yell, holler)</li>\n<li>They are inaudible but recap the conversation later</li>\n<li>You use the POV of someone(thing) closer to the dialogue (blade of grass, worm, bird or omniscient observer).</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>There is another way: have them speak somewhere else. After all - who talks when they're on a quad bike? They just ride, dude!!</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/36188", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/31405/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 36332, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>What are the consequences if you ignore these requests? If there are no consequences, add a filter to your email and divert them to the spam folder.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 36363, "author": "robertcday", "author_id": 31570, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/31570", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>If you have or can get hold of a couple of pieces of software, one being Microsoft Word (any old version) and the other being Calibre (free to download <a href=\"https://download.cnet.com/Calibre/3000-20412_4-10910277.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">here</a>) then you can use the instructions on this website to create an <em>NCX table of contents</em> in your HTML file:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://litworldinterviews.com/2015/07/02/how-to-create-a-ncx-table-of-contents-for-amazon-upload-using-calibre/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://litworldinterviews.com/2015/07/02/how-to-create-a-ncx-table-of-contents-for-amazon-upload-using-calibre/</a></p>\n\n<p>I've read the document through a couple of times and it looks straightforward enough (there are pictures!) but if you want anything clarifying then I'll be happy to try to do so in the comments.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/36294", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/8761/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 37604, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>You are writing a script (screenplay) for a visual display; I'd follow (roughly) the format of a script. For this particular question, you are looking for <a href=\"https://www.storysense.com/format/parentheticals.htm\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">\"Personal Direction\"</a> (of an actor) and the standard would be to specify what you want in parentheses after the name, before the speech. Although you might like a more concise format than the standard script format. </p>\n\n<p>The standard script format is specifically designed with very wide margins and double spacing so a page of dialogue will require about 60 seconds to film; and overall the duration of the film in minutes will be approximated by the number of pages in the script. That may not be important to you in a game; and you can always stopwatch reading the lines out loud, or going through the motions of acting out your scene, to get an idea of how much animation will be required to render it.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Girl (sarcastic): Noooooo! How could you tell?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>As you will see at the link, you can use more than a word, often whole sentences are used. As in a script, with <strong>no</strong> parenthetical, the expression to use is up to the actor and director; in your case that would be whomever is rendering your video. In your position I would make a point of deciding in each case; sooner or later <em>someone</em> has to decide.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>boy (amused): Sounds like someone's angry.<br>\n girl (sarcastic, amused): Noooooo! How could you tell?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>EDIT: Here is a <a href=\"https://www.filmmakerforum.org/scripts/1655-facial-expressions-words-great-script-writing.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">list of 100 one-word facial expressions</a> you might find useful. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37606, "author": "Jason Bassford", "author_id": 30561, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30561", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't think it's going to be possible to translate every written interaction into something that's understandable in purely visual form.</p>\n\n<p>In the example you provide, for example, I can't think of any kind of visual representation that would unambiguously convey <em>sounds like somebody's angry</em>. In fact, any kind of surprised expression would more likely convey something like a generic <em>What was that noise?</em></p>\n\n<p>I'm not saying that you shouldn't give up on some things, but I think you'd be more successful if you limited your <em>vocabulary</em> to a series of much more basic cues.</p>\n\n<p>As another example, if somebody \"jumping\" and looking elsewhere is a cue for <em>What was that?</em> the other person shrugging would likely be interpreted as <em>I don't know</em>.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, eye rolling of one person would more likely be interpreted as some kind of irritation of that person with what the other person has said, not something more refined.</p>\n\n<p>In other words, don't assume that visual cues can convey any kind of subtlety—stick to broad and \"cartoonish\" displays which are not likely to be misinterpreted.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, if I've misinterpreted, and you actually mean to provided text along with the visuals, then that's something else. I would expect an animator to create the visuals appropriate to the text just as I would expect a director to manage the expressions of actors who follow the dialogue they are speaking.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37607, "author": "F1Krazy", "author_id": 23927, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23927", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I've been writing an actual visual novel for a few years, so I'm going to approach this from a game development perspective as much as a writing perspective.</p>\n\n<p>To help me with this problem, I borrowed a technique from the VN <em>Katawa Shoujo</em>. The images for the character sprites are all named using a pattern something like <code>name_outfit_pose_expression</code>, with <code>outfit</code> being omitted if they're wearing their school uniform.</p>\n\n<p>So what I've started doing is, whenever a character's pose and/or facial expression would change, I insert a line of pseudocode with a fake file name, telling me what the new pose/expression would be. Something like:</p>\n\n<p><code>Boy: Sounds like someone's angry.</code><br>\n<code>[show \"girl_foldarms_rolleyes\"]</code><br>\n<code>Girl: Noooooo! How could you tell?</code></p>\n\n<p>This also helps you keep track of how many sprites you need for each character when it's time to do the artwork. If a search for <code>show 'girl_</code> returns 400 results, you'll need to do a rethink of whether you actually <em>need</em> that many sprites, because that's a lot of work for the art department.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37608, "author": "wetcircuit", "author_id": 23253, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23253", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Depending on your story engine there will likely be an embedded tagging system to signal instructions to the game engine via the script. The general idea is that you'd use a <em>consistent</em> tag followed by short commands that are parsed from the script before the words are printed to the screen, for example:</p>\n\n<p><strong>@BOY(LAUGH) Sounds like someone's angry.</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>@GIRL(EYEROLL) Noooooo! How could you tell?</strong></p>\n\n<p>The game engine parses each line as it comes out of the story engine. It sees the @ and reads the letters that follow to learn the character who is speaking, and their facial gesture that goes with that line.</p>\n\n<p>There might also be tags for @AUDIO, @SCENE, @BKG @INCLUDES, etc. If you are not the one programming the game engine, you just need to keep your tags <em>consistent and simple</em> so they can be edited by the programmer with <em>SEARCH/REPLACE</em>.</p>\n\n<p>The general idea is that there will be a limited number of facial gestures (typically 6-8). Your expression tags will be edited by the programmer to match the facial gestures that are available. In dynamic stories, characters will be swapped by the story engine but their face gestures will have the same names – ergo it won't matter if Linda or Bill says a certain line, the script will still provide them with the correct expression. </p>\n\n<p>The story engine script will probably assemble parts of the story dynamically, so the actual script will be replaced by variables and function calls. Let's say a scene might have Linda or Bill as the friend who reacts. Bill also thinks it's funny and responds with sarcasm. Linda however knows who is yelling and her reaction is different. The story engine script will look something like:</p>\n\n<p><strong>@AUDIO(\"ManShouts.WAV\")</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>@WAIT(5)</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>@{NPC1(LAUGH)} Sounds like someone's angry.</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>@{FRIEND(DO_REACTION)} {FRIEND(GET_REPLY)}</strong></p>\n\n<p>The story engine dynamically updates the script variables, filling in the character's names, gestures, and replies. The game engine parses the directions from the script and displays the appropriate sound and graphics, in this case the variable FRIEND is replaced by either Bill or Linda and the game engine sees:</p>\n\n<p><strong>@LINDA(UPSET) I'll see you later.</strong></p>\n\n<p>The more you learn about the underlying story and game engine, the more dynamic your narrative can become, but there will always be this bottleneck between the story engine and the game engine where simple directions are parsed from the script itself. Have a conversation with the programer and artist so everyone can be on the same page with what is possible.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/37603", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23083/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 37839, "author": "Todd Wilcox", "author_id": 22737, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/22737", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Introduce one or more characters who know less than the readers. It's not a bad idea to always have someone in every scene who knows less than the reader, or to have some characters who are in the dark about parts of the story and others who are in the dark about other parts.</p>\n\n<p>If you really can't figure out how there could be someone who doesn't know something about the scene, then perhaps the reader doesn't need to know it either.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37842, "author": "Ash", "author_id": 26012, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26012", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Drip-feed; only mention where you're differing from convention where it matters, when it matters. Sorry I don't do direct fan-fiction not in my writing nor my reading but let me try and elaborate without specific examples of fan-fiction. </p>\n\n<p>Terry Pratchett's <em><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_Jugulum\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Capre Jugulum</a></em> comes to mind, the line \"everyone who knows anything about ... knows\" gets used on a number of occasions to outline the things that people think, about both vampires and witches, that just aren't so. In this way readers are led to an understanding of how the rules do and don't work in this particular world through a number of small incidents rather than it feeling like a book of rules about the powers of witches and vampires; which is kind of what the novel actually is.</p>\n\n<p>Tell the audience only what they need to know to understand the piece in front of them and only tell them where you're breaking with canon when it makes a serious difference. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37844, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>First, Ash's &quot;drip-feed&quot; is good advice. We are trying to avoid info-<em><strong>dumping</strong></em>, not information in general.</p>\n<p>As for technique, my personal favorite is through the thoughts and memories of the POV character. This can take some engineering on the part of the author to produce scenes that force the information out.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Mark shook his head. &quot;I won't do that, sir, the engine will explode.&quot;</p>\n<p>Wen Li was confused. Surely Mark knew the engine wouldn't explode, that was the whole point of him installing a Markhan monitor in the first place, three years ago. What game was he playing?</p>\n<p>&quot;Wen?&quot; the captain said. &quot;Is that true?&quot;</p>\n<p>Mark did not even glance at her, he was cool and composed. Screw it. &quot;Chief is absolutely right sir. I'd have said so myself.&quot;</p>\n<p>And that means, the new captain doesn't trust Mark, and Mark doesn't trust him, and that boy better explain why she just risked her grade lying to a captain.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Give the (or a) POV character a reason to think on the information you want to convey, add a dash of conflict and the mission is painlessly accomplished.</p>\n<p>Note that avoiding info-dumps is pretty much always much longer than just telling people. In this case, &quot;The Markhan monitor keeps the fusion engine from exploding.&quot; But that is what it takes to weave the info into the story.</p>\n<p>Edit: And besides that, trust in your reader's ability to infer things from relatively minor clues. We do that IRL all the time when we meet people, especially new people, and we are conscious of their dress, language, grooming, accent, etc. Not everything needs to be revealed <em>explicitly</em>.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&quot;Mark! Haven't seen you in years!&quot; He held his hand out to the girl. &quot;Hi I'm Jeff, Mark and I came up in Boston together.&quot;</p>\n<p>She shook his hand, Jeff noticed a wedding ring on her left hand as she shifted her purse.</p>\n<p>&quot;I'm Jen. Got to go, daycare.&quot; She looked at Mark. &quot;See you at home. In fact, grab a pizza.&quot;</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Jeff doesn't need anything else to realize Mark is married to Jen and they have at least one kid, and it isn't their honeymoon, and Mark knows what Jen wants on a pizza and from where. This is just a bit of personal information, but the same applies to world building. Don't treat your readers like third graders, or be so paranoid you have to spell things out for them. You can find ways to hint at it, and making inferences can be part of the fun of reading.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 37846, "author": "HorriblePerson", "author_id": 28385, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28385", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>How did the original material introduce its setting, characters and mechanics to you? Exactly. Just do that, and chances are people who liked the way the original series did it will like the way your fanfiction does it as well. And if they didn't like the way it was done in the original series, then they probably won't be searching for its fanfictions, anyway.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 42302, "author": "TheWolfEmperor", "author_id": 36717, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/36717", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>One good piece of advice I got is that it is not info dumping if the information is necessary. For example, I wrote a lot of Animorphs fanfiction back in the say. </p>\n\n<p>Every single book of the Animorphs series begins as of you never read the series before. So it's two and a half pages or more of the characters reminding you who they are, what they can do, and why they are fighting an alien race, etc. This is not only necessary information but it's in keeping in style with how the books are written. </p>\n\n<p>Of I was writing a Pokemon fanfiction, I don't need to tell anyone what a Pokemon is, or what the pokeball does. I can write a scene where the trainer finds Nidoran and show the reader how everything works in this world.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/37848", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25920/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 37931, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use them. In other words, both systems, as well as several other similar systems, use similar terms to describe their models and functions quite independent of each other. It is not like comparing two minivans from different manufacturers. There is no agreed definition of horsepower or steering wheel or door that you can use to compare them with. You basically have to get down to the nitty gritty implementation details and see how they differ. </p>\n\n<p>In my forthcoming book, <em>Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process</em>, I try to provide some tool-neutral terminology for talking about structured writing methods, largely by avoiding these confusing terms altogether. When it comes to terms like module and topic, I suggest four types of information block: the semantic block (objects that writers would recognize independent of a structured writing system, like lists and tables), the structural block (the things semantic blocks are made from), the information typing block (the kind of blocks found in information typing theory, such as Information Mapping), and the rhetorical block (the thing that is actually meant to be read). </p>\n\n<p>But even with those terms, I could not tell you which of these things a DITA topic is, because the term is just not well defined. Depending on how you use it, it could be any one of my four types. I don't know S1000D well enough to say how their idea of a module would fit, but I suspect it would be similarly vague. </p>\n\n<p>Content, fundamentally, has fuzzy boundaries. It is all the stuff that does not fit neatly into data structures. Structured writing tries to make content look enough like a data structure to be processable by algorithms, but if you try to do that in a general way, you end up making your containers pretty fuzzy in order to fit around all the varied things they have to contain. And thus those containers tend to defy both characterization and comparison. </p>\n\n<p>If you actually want containers that can be defined and compared with any degree of strictness, you have to be much more specific to the subject matter, audience, and type of document you are dealing with. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38027, "author": "kibukj", "author_id": 32548, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32548", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Topic-based authoring is a kind of modular authoring. Modular authoring is simply any kind of authoring where content is written in reusable pieces (modules), which may then be combined to form one or more publications, instead of writing a publication as a single unit. One advantage of this approach is that when two publications contain the same information, you only need to update that information in one place. DITA calls these pieces topics, and S1000D calls these pieces data modules.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D is more of a whole <em>process</em> for creating technical documentation. The specification includes XML schemas which are used for the actual authoring of content, but it also covers much more, such as data exchange, quality assurance, version control, presentation in both page-based and electronic formats, etc.</p>\n\n<p>That said, the S1000D schemas are more rigid than DITA. DITA allows a lot more customization of the schemas through <em>specialization</em>. S1000D really only allows you to add extra constraints on top of the schemas by use of <em>Business Rules Exchange (BREX)</em> data modules, and a tool which can validate S1000D modules against a BREX.</p>\n\n<p>For example, the schemas allow the values of attribute <code>emphasisType</code> to be <code>\"em01\"</code> thru <code>\"em99\"</code>, but you can limit your project to only using <code>\"em01\"</code> (bold) and <code>\"em02\"</code> (italics) with a BREX rule:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;structureObjectRule&gt;\n &lt;objectPath allowedObjectFlag=\"2\"&gt;//@emphasisType&lt;/objectPath&gt;\n &lt;objectUse&gt;The value of attribute emphasisType must be em01 (bold) or em02 (italics)&lt;/objectUse&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em01\"&gt;bold&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em02\"&gt;italics&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n&lt;/structureObjectRule&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>The BREX validation tool would present the erroneous XML branch to the user with the <code>objectUse</code> message if they used <code>\"em03\"</code> for example.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D also has a very particular paradigm for the creation of modules, using a <em>Standard Numbering System (SNS)</em> and <em>information codes</em>. The SNS tells you what component of the product that module is about, and the information code tells you what kind of information the module contains about the component.</p>\n\n<p>For example, if you define the SNS <code>32-00-00</code> to mean \"Landing gear\", and you take the information code <code>040</code> which means \"Description\", you get the data module \"DMC-PLANE-32-00-00-00A-040A-D\" which is titled \"Landing gear - Description\".</p>\n\n<p>To hopefully clear up your confusion about <em>publication modules</em>, they define the structure of a publication only. They list what data modules will appear in the publication, and in what order:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;pm&gt;\n &lt;identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;!-- snip --&gt;\n &lt;/identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;content&gt;\n &lt;pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"00\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"001\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Aeroplane&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Title page&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;!-- more data module references... --&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"32\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"040\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Landing gear&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Description&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;/pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;/content&gt;\n&lt;/pm&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>You can also create hierarchical groups by nesting <code>&lt;pmEntry&gt;</code> elements and titling them with <code>&lt;pmEntryTitle&gt;</code></p>\n\n<p>Lastly, I'd like to slightly correct one thing you quoted:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>S1000D does have intra-data module reuse, via <em>Common Information Repositories (CIR)</em> (or Technical Information Repositories (TIR) pre-Issue 4.1). But these are limited to specific kinds of information such as parts information, common warnings and cautions, functional item numbers, etc., for which the specification has defined a CIR. DITA still has more granular reuse, because with the <code>conref</code> mechanism and XInclude, you can reference just about <em>any</em> element in <em>any</em> document. Although XInclude is not specific to DITA, the S1000D schemas do not allow the use of it as of the latest issue (4.2).</p>\n\n<p><strong>CIR example:</strong></p>\n\n<p>You have a common part called the \"ABC connector\". Your parts repository contains details about it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;partSpec&gt;\n &lt;partIdent manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;itemIdentData&gt;\n &lt;descrForPart&gt;10 mm ABC connector&lt;/descrForPart&gt;\n &lt;partKeyword&gt;connector&lt;/partKeyword&gt;\n &lt;shortName&gt;ABC connector&lt;/shortName&gt;\n &lt;/itemIdentData&gt;\n&lt;/partSpec&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>In a procedural data module where this connector is required as a spare part, instead of duplicating the above information, you can reference it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;reqSpares&gt;\n &lt;spareDescrGroup&gt;\n &lt;spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;partRef manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;reqQuantity&gt;1&lt;/reqQuantity&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescrGroup&gt;\n&lt;/reqSpares&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>This data module is said to be <em>CIR-dependent</em> because it only contains a reference to the part. You have two main options for delivering it:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Resolve the CIR reference by copying the information from the parts CIR in to the data module. This could be an automated process at publish time, for example. Afterwards, the data module is said to be <em>standalone</em>.</li>\n<li>Distribute the CIR with the data module. This is more common when you're publishing to an <em>Interactive Electronic Technical Publication (IETP)</em> viewer that can fetch the information from the CIR at run-time.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38268, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision:</p>\n\n<p><strong>1)</strong> <a href=\"https://blog.sdl.com/digital-experience/s1000d-or-dita-which-should-you-use/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use?</a>\n...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software development provides the same \"common wisdom\" that you mentioned, and emphasizes the different philosophy of DITA \"flexibility\" vs S1000D \"standard\" (the \"Theory X and Theory Y\" part). <em>...\"S1000D implementers dream of the flexibility of DITA, but understand why they’re locked into the S1000D “standard”.\"</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>2)</strong> <a href=\"https://www.onestrand.com/dita-vs-s1000d-which-one-is-right-for-me/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA vs S1000D - Which One Is Right For Me?</a>\n...Specifications, including the differences, benefits and disadvantages to working with each. From an aerospace-industry oriented source. </p>\n\n<p><strong>3)</strong> <a href=\"http://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/technical-communication/article/ten-reasons-why-dita-and-agile-are-made-for-each-other/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA and software development</a>:\nTen reasons why DITA and Agile are made for each other and a match for software development teams: Starts from \"Topic-based approach\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/base/topicover.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA topic</a>), \"Task topic type\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/technicalContent/dita-generic-task-topic.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA General task topic</a>), and more.</p>\n\n<p><strong>4)</strong> <a href=\"http://ditaworks.com/unravelling-dita-and-s1000d/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Another publication</a> states \"What sets DITA apart\" (from S1000D). <em>...is \"its <a href=\"https://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/ditaspecialization.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">specialization</a>s\" and \"inherited versatility\".</em> <em>...Example: IBM developerWorks: <a href=\"https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-dita2/index.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Specializing topic types in DITA: Creating new topic-based document types</a>.</em></p>\n\n<p>In addition:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker can be used to handle DITA projects. </li>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker comes ready for DITA out of the box.</li>\n<li>Adobe promotes DITA (Google it: <a href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=Adobe%20DITA%20World\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Adobe DITA World</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>--</p>\n\n<p>I emailed <em>Keith Schengili-Roberts</em> from IXIASOFT (of publication number 3) about the technical-differences and his answer was a chapter from his book, that you already mentioned. I repeat:</p>\n\n<p>\"S1000D does include a mechanism for the reuse of content, known as data modules. These data modules can contain text and/or graphic content, and can be ‘plugged in’ where needed within any S1000D document. There are a number of data module types, roughly analogous to the DITA topic types, <em>and include information that is specific for creating checklists, service bulletins, front matter, parts data, wiring data, learning modules, procedures, faults, information for the crew/operator and more. As you can see from this short list, many of the data modules were originally tailored for specific purposes within the aerospace sector which would not apply in more general circumstances</em>.\"\n ... \"The specificity of some of its module types to the aerospace and related industries limits the appeal for its adoption outside of these sectors.\"</p>\n\n<p>(In S1000D) \"Each data module comes with a unique identifier, called the Data Module Code, which is designed in part as a mechanism for ensuring that the same module do not appear more than once within a single document. <em>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</em>\"</p>\n\n<p>(In DITA) \"One of the chief differentiators of DITA when compared to the other documentation standards available is the ability to reuse content at both granular (i.e. word, phrase, sentence, topic) and topic/chapter levels. From a practical perspective, it is these multiple stages of reuse that come into play into making DITA a popular standard, making possible the additional advantages of consistent messaging, lower localization costs, and greater efficiencies as writers reuse existing content instead of having to recreate it.\"</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/37928", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23921/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 37931, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use them. In other words, both systems, as well as several other similar systems, use similar terms to describe their models and functions quite independent of each other. It is not like comparing two minivans from different manufacturers. There is no agreed definition of horsepower or steering wheel or door that you can use to compare them with. You basically have to get down to the nitty gritty implementation details and see how they differ. </p>\n\n<p>In my forthcoming book, <em>Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process</em>, I try to provide some tool-neutral terminology for talking about structured writing methods, largely by avoiding these confusing terms altogether. When it comes to terms like module and topic, I suggest four types of information block: the semantic block (objects that writers would recognize independent of a structured writing system, like lists and tables), the structural block (the things semantic blocks are made from), the information typing block (the kind of blocks found in information typing theory, such as Information Mapping), and the rhetorical block (the thing that is actually meant to be read). </p>\n\n<p>But even with those terms, I could not tell you which of these things a DITA topic is, because the term is just not well defined. Depending on how you use it, it could be any one of my four types. I don't know S1000D well enough to say how their idea of a module would fit, but I suspect it would be similarly vague. </p>\n\n<p>Content, fundamentally, has fuzzy boundaries. It is all the stuff that does not fit neatly into data structures. Structured writing tries to make content look enough like a data structure to be processable by algorithms, but if you try to do that in a general way, you end up making your containers pretty fuzzy in order to fit around all the varied things they have to contain. And thus those containers tend to defy both characterization and comparison. </p>\n\n<p>If you actually want containers that can be defined and compared with any degree of strictness, you have to be much more specific to the subject matter, audience, and type of document you are dealing with. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38027, "author": "kibukj", "author_id": 32548, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32548", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Topic-based authoring is a kind of modular authoring. Modular authoring is simply any kind of authoring where content is written in reusable pieces (modules), which may then be combined to form one or more publications, instead of writing a publication as a single unit. One advantage of this approach is that when two publications contain the same information, you only need to update that information in one place. DITA calls these pieces topics, and S1000D calls these pieces data modules.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D is more of a whole <em>process</em> for creating technical documentation. The specification includes XML schemas which are used for the actual authoring of content, but it also covers much more, such as data exchange, quality assurance, version control, presentation in both page-based and electronic formats, etc.</p>\n\n<p>That said, the S1000D schemas are more rigid than DITA. DITA allows a lot more customization of the schemas through <em>specialization</em>. S1000D really only allows you to add extra constraints on top of the schemas by use of <em>Business Rules Exchange (BREX)</em> data modules, and a tool which can validate S1000D modules against a BREX.</p>\n\n<p>For example, the schemas allow the values of attribute <code>emphasisType</code> to be <code>\"em01\"</code> thru <code>\"em99\"</code>, but you can limit your project to only using <code>\"em01\"</code> (bold) and <code>\"em02\"</code> (italics) with a BREX rule:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;structureObjectRule&gt;\n &lt;objectPath allowedObjectFlag=\"2\"&gt;//@emphasisType&lt;/objectPath&gt;\n &lt;objectUse&gt;The value of attribute emphasisType must be em01 (bold) or em02 (italics)&lt;/objectUse&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em01\"&gt;bold&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em02\"&gt;italics&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n&lt;/structureObjectRule&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>The BREX validation tool would present the erroneous XML branch to the user with the <code>objectUse</code> message if they used <code>\"em03\"</code> for example.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D also has a very particular paradigm for the creation of modules, using a <em>Standard Numbering System (SNS)</em> and <em>information codes</em>. The SNS tells you what component of the product that module is about, and the information code tells you what kind of information the module contains about the component.</p>\n\n<p>For example, if you define the SNS <code>32-00-00</code> to mean \"Landing gear\", and you take the information code <code>040</code> which means \"Description\", you get the data module \"DMC-PLANE-32-00-00-00A-040A-D\" which is titled \"Landing gear - Description\".</p>\n\n<p>To hopefully clear up your confusion about <em>publication modules</em>, they define the structure of a publication only. They list what data modules will appear in the publication, and in what order:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;pm&gt;\n &lt;identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;!-- snip --&gt;\n &lt;/identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;content&gt;\n &lt;pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"00\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"001\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Aeroplane&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Title page&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;!-- more data module references... --&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"32\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"040\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Landing gear&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Description&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;/pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;/content&gt;\n&lt;/pm&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>You can also create hierarchical groups by nesting <code>&lt;pmEntry&gt;</code> elements and titling them with <code>&lt;pmEntryTitle&gt;</code></p>\n\n<p>Lastly, I'd like to slightly correct one thing you quoted:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>S1000D does have intra-data module reuse, via <em>Common Information Repositories (CIR)</em> (or Technical Information Repositories (TIR) pre-Issue 4.1). But these are limited to specific kinds of information such as parts information, common warnings and cautions, functional item numbers, etc., for which the specification has defined a CIR. DITA still has more granular reuse, because with the <code>conref</code> mechanism and XInclude, you can reference just about <em>any</em> element in <em>any</em> document. Although XInclude is not specific to DITA, the S1000D schemas do not allow the use of it as of the latest issue (4.2).</p>\n\n<p><strong>CIR example:</strong></p>\n\n<p>You have a common part called the \"ABC connector\". Your parts repository contains details about it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;partSpec&gt;\n &lt;partIdent manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;itemIdentData&gt;\n &lt;descrForPart&gt;10 mm ABC connector&lt;/descrForPart&gt;\n &lt;partKeyword&gt;connector&lt;/partKeyword&gt;\n &lt;shortName&gt;ABC connector&lt;/shortName&gt;\n &lt;/itemIdentData&gt;\n&lt;/partSpec&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>In a procedural data module where this connector is required as a spare part, instead of duplicating the above information, you can reference it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;reqSpares&gt;\n &lt;spareDescrGroup&gt;\n &lt;spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;partRef manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;reqQuantity&gt;1&lt;/reqQuantity&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescrGroup&gt;\n&lt;/reqSpares&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>This data module is said to be <em>CIR-dependent</em> because it only contains a reference to the part. You have two main options for delivering it:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Resolve the CIR reference by copying the information from the parts CIR in to the data module. This could be an automated process at publish time, for example. Afterwards, the data module is said to be <em>standalone</em>.</li>\n<li>Distribute the CIR with the data module. This is more common when you're publishing to an <em>Interactive Electronic Technical Publication (IETP)</em> viewer that can fetch the information from the CIR at run-time.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38268, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision:</p>\n\n<p><strong>1)</strong> <a href=\"https://blog.sdl.com/digital-experience/s1000d-or-dita-which-should-you-use/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use?</a>\n...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software development provides the same \"common wisdom\" that you mentioned, and emphasizes the different philosophy of DITA \"flexibility\" vs S1000D \"standard\" (the \"Theory X and Theory Y\" part). <em>...\"S1000D implementers dream of the flexibility of DITA, but understand why they’re locked into the S1000D “standard”.\"</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>2)</strong> <a href=\"https://www.onestrand.com/dita-vs-s1000d-which-one-is-right-for-me/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA vs S1000D - Which One Is Right For Me?</a>\n...Specifications, including the differences, benefits and disadvantages to working with each. From an aerospace-industry oriented source. </p>\n\n<p><strong>3)</strong> <a href=\"http://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/technical-communication/article/ten-reasons-why-dita-and-agile-are-made-for-each-other/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA and software development</a>:\nTen reasons why DITA and Agile are made for each other and a match for software development teams: Starts from \"Topic-based approach\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/base/topicover.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA topic</a>), \"Task topic type\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/technicalContent/dita-generic-task-topic.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA General task topic</a>), and more.</p>\n\n<p><strong>4)</strong> <a href=\"http://ditaworks.com/unravelling-dita-and-s1000d/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Another publication</a> states \"What sets DITA apart\" (from S1000D). <em>...is \"its <a href=\"https://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/ditaspecialization.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">specialization</a>s\" and \"inherited versatility\".</em> <em>...Example: IBM developerWorks: <a href=\"https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-dita2/index.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Specializing topic types in DITA: Creating new topic-based document types</a>.</em></p>\n\n<p>In addition:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker can be used to handle DITA projects. </li>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker comes ready for DITA out of the box.</li>\n<li>Adobe promotes DITA (Google it: <a href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=Adobe%20DITA%20World\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Adobe DITA World</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>--</p>\n\n<p>I emailed <em>Keith Schengili-Roberts</em> from IXIASOFT (of publication number 3) about the technical-differences and his answer was a chapter from his book, that you already mentioned. I repeat:</p>\n\n<p>\"S1000D does include a mechanism for the reuse of content, known as data modules. These data modules can contain text and/or graphic content, and can be ‘plugged in’ where needed within any S1000D document. There are a number of data module types, roughly analogous to the DITA topic types, <em>and include information that is specific for creating checklists, service bulletins, front matter, parts data, wiring data, learning modules, procedures, faults, information for the crew/operator and more. As you can see from this short list, many of the data modules were originally tailored for specific purposes within the aerospace sector which would not apply in more general circumstances</em>.\"\n ... \"The specificity of some of its module types to the aerospace and related industries limits the appeal for its adoption outside of these sectors.\"</p>\n\n<p>(In S1000D) \"Each data module comes with a unique identifier, called the Data Module Code, which is designed in part as a mechanism for ensuring that the same module do not appear more than once within a single document. <em>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</em>\"</p>\n\n<p>(In DITA) \"One of the chief differentiators of DITA when compared to the other documentation standards available is the ability to reuse content at both granular (i.e. word, phrase, sentence, topic) and topic/chapter levels. From a practical perspective, it is these multiple stages of reuse that come into play into making DITA a popular standard, making possible the additional advantages of consistent messaging, lower localization costs, and greater efficiencies as writers reuse existing content instead of having to recreate it.\"</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/37934", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/22176/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 37931, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes, these sorts of comparisons between systems are very difficult, essentially because there is no independent definition of terms like topic and module outside of the particular systems that use them. In other words, both systems, as well as several other similar systems, use similar terms to describe their models and functions quite independent of each other. It is not like comparing two minivans from different manufacturers. There is no agreed definition of horsepower or steering wheel or door that you can use to compare them with. You basically have to get down to the nitty gritty implementation details and see how they differ. </p>\n\n<p>In my forthcoming book, <em>Structured Writing: Rhetoric and Process</em>, I try to provide some tool-neutral terminology for talking about structured writing methods, largely by avoiding these confusing terms altogether. When it comes to terms like module and topic, I suggest four types of information block: the semantic block (objects that writers would recognize independent of a structured writing system, like lists and tables), the structural block (the things semantic blocks are made from), the information typing block (the kind of blocks found in information typing theory, such as Information Mapping), and the rhetorical block (the thing that is actually meant to be read). </p>\n\n<p>But even with those terms, I could not tell you which of these things a DITA topic is, because the term is just not well defined. Depending on how you use it, it could be any one of my four types. I don't know S1000D well enough to say how their idea of a module would fit, but I suspect it would be similarly vague. </p>\n\n<p>Content, fundamentally, has fuzzy boundaries. It is all the stuff that does not fit neatly into data structures. Structured writing tries to make content look enough like a data structure to be processable by algorithms, but if you try to do that in a general way, you end up making your containers pretty fuzzy in order to fit around all the varied things they have to contain. And thus those containers tend to defy both characterization and comparison. </p>\n\n<p>If you actually want containers that can be defined and compared with any degree of strictness, you have to be much more specific to the subject matter, audience, and type of document you are dealing with. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38027, "author": "kibukj", "author_id": 32548, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32548", "pm_score": 4, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Topic-based authoring is a kind of modular authoring. Modular authoring is simply any kind of authoring where content is written in reusable pieces (modules), which may then be combined to form one or more publications, instead of writing a publication as a single unit. One advantage of this approach is that when two publications contain the same information, you only need to update that information in one place. DITA calls these pieces topics, and S1000D calls these pieces data modules.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D is more of a whole <em>process</em> for creating technical documentation. The specification includes XML schemas which are used for the actual authoring of content, but it also covers much more, such as data exchange, quality assurance, version control, presentation in both page-based and electronic formats, etc.</p>\n\n<p>That said, the S1000D schemas are more rigid than DITA. DITA allows a lot more customization of the schemas through <em>specialization</em>. S1000D really only allows you to add extra constraints on top of the schemas by use of <em>Business Rules Exchange (BREX)</em> data modules, and a tool which can validate S1000D modules against a BREX.</p>\n\n<p>For example, the schemas allow the values of attribute <code>emphasisType</code> to be <code>\"em01\"</code> thru <code>\"em99\"</code>, but you can limit your project to only using <code>\"em01\"</code> (bold) and <code>\"em02\"</code> (italics) with a BREX rule:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;structureObjectRule&gt;\n &lt;objectPath allowedObjectFlag=\"2\"&gt;//@emphasisType&lt;/objectPath&gt;\n &lt;objectUse&gt;The value of attribute emphasisType must be em01 (bold) or em02 (italics)&lt;/objectUse&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em01\"&gt;bold&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n &lt;objectValue valueForm=\"single\" valueAllowed=\"em02\"&gt;italics&lt;/objectValue&gt;\n&lt;/structureObjectRule&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>The BREX validation tool would present the erroneous XML branch to the user with the <code>objectUse</code> message if they used <code>\"em03\"</code> for example.</p>\n\n<p>S1000D also has a very particular paradigm for the creation of modules, using a <em>Standard Numbering System (SNS)</em> and <em>information codes</em>. The SNS tells you what component of the product that module is about, and the information code tells you what kind of information the module contains about the component.</p>\n\n<p>For example, if you define the SNS <code>32-00-00</code> to mean \"Landing gear\", and you take the information code <code>040</code> which means \"Description\", you get the data module \"DMC-PLANE-32-00-00-00A-040A-D\" which is titled \"Landing gear - Description\".</p>\n\n<p>To hopefully clear up your confusion about <em>publication modules</em>, they define the structure of a publication only. They list what data modules will appear in the publication, and in what order:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;pm&gt;\n &lt;identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;!-- snip --&gt;\n &lt;/identAndStatusSection&gt;\n &lt;content&gt;\n &lt;pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"00\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"001\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Aeroplane&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Title page&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;!-- more data module references... --&gt;\n &lt;dmRef&gt;\n &lt;dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmCode modelIdentCode=\"PLANE\" systemDiffCode=\"A\" systemCode=\"32\" subSystemCode=\"0\" subSubSystemCode=\"0\" assyCode=\"00\" disassyCode=\"00\" disassyCodeVariant=\"A\" infoCode=\"040\" infoCodeVariant=\"A\" itemLocationCode=\"D\"/&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefIdent&gt;\n &lt;dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;techName&gt;Landing gear&lt;/techName&gt;\n &lt;infoName&gt;Description&lt;/infoName&gt;\n &lt;/dmTitle&gt;\n &lt;/dmRefAddressItems&gt;\n &lt;/dmRef&gt;\n &lt;/pmEntry&gt;\n &lt;/content&gt;\n&lt;/pm&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>You can also create hierarchical groups by nesting <code>&lt;pmEntry&gt;</code> elements and titling them with <code>&lt;pmEntryTitle&gt;</code></p>\n\n<p>Lastly, I'd like to slightly correct one thing you quoted:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>S1000D does have intra-data module reuse, via <em>Common Information Repositories (CIR)</em> (or Technical Information Repositories (TIR) pre-Issue 4.1). But these are limited to specific kinds of information such as parts information, common warnings and cautions, functional item numbers, etc., for which the specification has defined a CIR. DITA still has more granular reuse, because with the <code>conref</code> mechanism and XInclude, you can reference just about <em>any</em> element in <em>any</em> document. Although XInclude is not specific to DITA, the S1000D schemas do not allow the use of it as of the latest issue (4.2).</p>\n\n<p><strong>CIR example:</strong></p>\n\n<p>You have a common part called the \"ABC connector\". Your parts repository contains details about it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;partSpec&gt;\n &lt;partIdent manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;itemIdentData&gt;\n &lt;descrForPart&gt;10 mm ABC connector&lt;/descrForPart&gt;\n &lt;partKeyword&gt;connector&lt;/partKeyword&gt;\n &lt;shortName&gt;ABC connector&lt;/shortName&gt;\n &lt;/itemIdentData&gt;\n&lt;/partSpec&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>In a procedural data module where this connector is required as a spare part, instead of duplicating the above information, you can reference it:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;reqSpares&gt;\n &lt;spareDescrGroup&gt;\n &lt;spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;partRef manufacturerCodeValue=\"12345\" partNumberValue=\"ABC\"/&gt;\n &lt;reqQuantity&gt;1&lt;/reqQuantity&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescr&gt;\n &lt;/spareDescrGroup&gt;\n&lt;/reqSpares&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>This data module is said to be <em>CIR-dependent</em> because it only contains a reference to the part. You have two main options for delivering it:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>Resolve the CIR reference by copying the information from the parts CIR in to the data module. This could be an automated process at publish time, for example. Afterwards, the data module is said to be <em>standalone</em>.</li>\n<li>Distribute the CIR with the data module. This is more common when you're publishing to an <em>Interactive Electronic Technical Publication (IETP)</em> viewer that can fetch the information from the CIR at run-time.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 38268, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Few short publications, that summarize the differences, and guide to a decision:</p>\n\n<p><strong>1)</strong> <a href=\"https://blog.sdl.com/digital-experience/s1000d-or-dita-which-should-you-use/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">S1000D or DITA – Which Should You Use?</a>\n...A dude with 30+ years in the business of aerospace and software development provides the same \"common wisdom\" that you mentioned, and emphasizes the different philosophy of DITA \"flexibility\" vs S1000D \"standard\" (the \"Theory X and Theory Y\" part). <em>...\"S1000D implementers dream of the flexibility of DITA, but understand why they’re locked into the S1000D “standard”.\"</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>2)</strong> <a href=\"https://www.onestrand.com/dita-vs-s1000d-which-one-is-right-for-me/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA vs S1000D - Which One Is Right For Me?</a>\n...Specifications, including the differences, benefits and disadvantages to working with each. From an aerospace-industry oriented source. </p>\n\n<p><strong>3)</strong> <a href=\"http://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/technical-communication/article/ten-reasons-why-dita-and-agile-are-made-for-each-other/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA and software development</a>:\nTen reasons why DITA and Agile are made for each other and a match for software development teams: Starts from \"Topic-based approach\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/base/topicover.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA topic</a>), \"Task topic type\" (<a href=\"https://www.oxygenxml.com/dita/1.3/specs/archSpec/technicalContent/dita-generic-task-topic.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">DITA General task topic</a>), and more.</p>\n\n<p><strong>4)</strong> <a href=\"http://ditaworks.com/unravelling-dita-and-s1000d/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Another publication</a> states \"What sets DITA apart\" (from S1000D). <em>...is \"its <a href=\"https://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.0/archspec/ditaspecialization.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">specialization</a>s\" and \"inherited versatility\".</em> <em>...Example: IBM developerWorks: <a href=\"https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-dita2/index.html\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Specializing topic types in DITA: Creating new topic-based document types</a>.</em></p>\n\n<p>In addition:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker can be used to handle DITA projects. </li>\n<li>Adobe FrameMaker comes ready for DITA out of the box.</li>\n<li>Adobe promotes DITA (Google it: <a href=\"https://www.google.com/search?q=Adobe%20DITA%20World\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Adobe DITA World</a>)</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>--</p>\n\n<p>I emailed <em>Keith Schengili-Roberts</em> from IXIASOFT (of publication number 3) about the technical-differences and his answer was a chapter from his book, that you already mentioned. I repeat:</p>\n\n<p>\"S1000D does include a mechanism for the reuse of content, known as data modules. These data modules can contain text and/or graphic content, and can be ‘plugged in’ where needed within any S1000D document. There are a number of data module types, roughly analogous to the DITA topic types, <em>and include information that is specific for creating checklists, service bulletins, front matter, parts data, wiring data, learning modules, procedures, faults, information for the crew/operator and more. As you can see from this short list, many of the data modules were originally tailored for specific purposes within the aerospace sector which would not apply in more general circumstances</em>.\"\n ... \"The specificity of some of its module types to the aerospace and related industries limits the appeal for its adoption outside of these sectors.\"</p>\n\n<p>(In S1000D) \"Each data module comes with a unique identifier, called the Data Module Code, which is designed in part as a mechanism for ensuring that the same module do not appear more than once within a single document. <em>This points to one of the key differences between DITA and S1000D, which is the granularity of the level of reuse. While S1000D encourages reuse at the data module level (roughly equivalent to a topic within DITA), it does not have mechanisms for intra-data module reuse.</em>\"</p>\n\n<p>(In DITA) \"One of the chief differentiators of DITA when compared to the other documentation standards available is the ability to reuse content at both granular (i.e. word, phrase, sentence, topic) and topic/chapter levels. From a practical perspective, it is these multiple stages of reuse that come into play into making DITA a popular standard, making possible the additional advantages of consistent messaging, lower localization costs, and greater efficiencies as writers reuse existing content instead of having to recreate it.\"</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/37942", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32510/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 40431, "author": "weakdna", "author_id": 34214, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/34214", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I would incorporate their \"monologues\" into the actual chapters, or have chapters alternate between story and monologue. With as many as 6 characters, writing from so many points of view can be really chaotic, so I would have someone read it and ask them if they are confused or lost. Depending on how you execute this, it could go either way.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 40442, "author": "hszmv", "author_id": 25666, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25666", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>So I would highly recommend you look at K.A. Applegate's Animorphs series of books. The main series contains 54 books with 4 additional Megamorphs titles (featuring the Main characters but had little to no impact on the main title books... 3 of the four featured events that were undone by the end of their story) and 4 \"Chronicles\" novels which were pretty much prequel events to the main title. All books are written in First Person Prospective though the narrative character will change. Incidentally they had </p>\n\n<p>The main book titles featured one of the six characters (Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Marco, and Ax) doing the narration, with some exceptions (Books 19, 34, 42, 47, and 54). These books would also follow an ordered rotation of narrators that was changed late in the series. From books 1-40 (inclusive) the rotation was ordered such that each character got two books out of every ten, except Tobias and Ax (who got one book a piece out of every 10, due to being notoriously difficult to write). This saw that each character would consistently get books that ended in the following digits:</p>\n\n<p>Jake (1, 6)\nRachel (2, 7)\nTobias (3)*\nCassie (4, 9)\nMarco (5, 0)\nAx (8)*</p>\n\n<p>Starting on book 41 on, The rotation followed that the narrators would cycle Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Marco, Ax so that the full rotation occurred every six books.</p>\n\n<p>The Megamorphs Titles were generally seen as not having much impact and were basically a few breathers before or after some major plot element. The big difference of the Megamorphs from the main title was that all books were narrated by all six characters over the course of the story, though it was as needed and not as in any particular order. Three of the four dealt with time travel in someway, so while the events are remembered by the characters, the events got hit with a reset button and undone at the end. And two highlight that these events were going to be reset, at least two books had a character die and thus, was not narrator until the death was undone... if at all for that book.</p>\n\n<p>At the time they were written, main title books were written once a month, so the Megamorphs usually served to delay the release of the major event for another month... or serve to introduce a narrative device that the next book relied on (The first was after a major victory for the heroes in book 7 and just before the first book Ax would narrate in full, allowing readers to get a feel for his POV. The second one was right book was just after another major victory in book 18 and just before a very emotional book 19 which is the first one to feature two narrators (possibly placed to emphasize the way the switch worked). The third occurred before book 30, which was another emotionally heavy story and the fourth occurred before the new rotation was introduced.).</p>\n\n<p>Finally, the Chronicles Books normally followed the POV of a secondary character in full, and deals with issues that occurred prior to the events of Book one, though all of them are framed as the protaganist recounting memories during some point in the main line series (The novel \"Visser\" does not have a Chronicles title, but it's structurally the same thing... it also is the only book to pick up directly from events of the previous main series). The Hork-Bajir Chronicles is the only Cronicles that featuse multiple First Person narrators (four of them) and, which follows the Megamorph format.</p>\n\n<p>As the books had numbered chapters with no titles, any time a narrative transition occurred, it was always during a chapter break. The new narrator would be named (The Chapter would read \"Chapter 6: Jake\" and followed by a picture of the narrator, normally taken from the cover art or recent book with the character) and the next chapter would feature that chapter's narrator, even if it was the same character (though this was rare).</p>\n\n<p>In the Main Line books that did this transition, the character who was the narrator in that rotation would not be introduced in every chapter in this format, but rather, only when the guest narrator was transitioned out and the regular would resume their narrative. The only exception to this was book 54, as it was the last story in the series, so it took turns describing everyone's reaction to the aftermath, though it did start with the proper character in the ordinary rotation (Rachel).</p>\n\n<p>I know it's a lot to describe, but this was mostly to show that the system was largely consistent and was used to great effect through out the series.</p>\n\n<p>/* The reason for this was that both characters were very hard to right consistent stories like the other four. In the case of Tobias (who had been trapped as a Hawk morph in the first book), he filled the team's scout role and spent significant time alone and isolated from the other characters. Most of his books were very introspectively narrated or required him to go on solo missions without much in the way of back-up. Ax, being an alien among five humans, was also featured in stories that were mostly him having long solo moments and often focused on him being put into moral dilema's that forced him to choose between his loyalties to his Honorable Warrior Race and his Human allies that he worked with, specifically Jake, who Ax early on professed an oath to serve (Honorable Warrior thing...) but realized Jake was not always the most orthodox leader by his alien standards. He would often keep information from the rest of the team because of this and had to work his way through the ramifications of those choices.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/39927", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/33683/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 40895, "author": "SFWriter", "author_id": 26683, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26683", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Offsetting a single sentence as it's own paragraph is one way to emphasize that sentence or idea, and yes, you will see this done in the books you read. It is a more common device in some genres and age ranges than others. Keep in mind that some writers, especially novices, use this device more heavily than maybe they should. Too much becomes exhausting to read, as though the author is saying \"This is important!\" \"This too!\" And this!\" </p>\n\n<p>Think of it like italics. You could italicize a word in every sentence for emphasis. Hopefully you agree this would be a bad idea, and that it would become visually annoying after about three instances. You'd probably even scan ahead and get the idea that the author <em>really</em> abused italics. Same with offsetting single sentences. </p>\n\n<p>Use the tool sparingly.</p>\n\n<p>^^See what I did there? That sentence could have been included in the previous paragraph. It carries more oomph by being offset. But now try to imagine every sentence in this answer as having its own paragraph. This page would appear to have about fifteen paragraphs--each a single sentence--and you'd start to wonder if I was soft in the head. So, the answer to your question is yes, but please read some of your favorite books to get a feel for how often to do this, and with which types of sentences. (Perhaps concluding sentences.)</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 40906, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<h1>The convention</h1>\n<h2>In print</h2>\n<p>In print, paragraphs that are part of the same scene are set off of each other by <em>paragraphs breaks</em> alone. There is no extra white space between paragraphs:</p>\n<p>           <a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/SshQc.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/SshQc.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<p>In print, if there is additional white space between paragraphs, that white space means that the next paragraph belongs to another scene:</p>\n<p>          <a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/VagE1.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/VagE1.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<h2>Online</h2>\n<p>Online, <em><strong>all paragraphs are (or should be) separated by additional white space</strong></em>, as they are on this site, because that increases readability on computer monitors.</p>\n<p>The following image shows that paragraphs on this site are <em>not</em> separated by multiple line breaks and an empty line, but only by a large margin:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/RBGaP.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/RBGaP.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\" /></a></p>\n<h1>Deviation from convention</h1>\n<p>Of course you can deviate from convention in your writing. But it is good to understand what the convention is and to deviate from it consciously.</p>\n<p>If you know what white space between pagagraphs means conventionally, you can use this effect. For example, if you offset a single sentence from a preceding paragraph with additional whitespace in print, the reader will expect a change in time, place, or protagonist. If none of these happen, that is, if the offset paragraph clearly continues the situation from the preceding paragraph, the offset will cause the reader to search for an explanation for its unconventional placement.</p>\n<p>What explanation the reader finds, <em>lies outside of your influence</em>. That is the allure of creative writing: that everyone can read into it what they want.</p>\n<p>But be careful! If you deviate from convention once in one novel, the reader will likely find this intriguing. But if you disregard convention completely, the effect may be confusing and unattractive.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 40913, "author": "Jay", "author_id": 4489, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/4489", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>\"Am I allowed ...\" No. If you do this, the Writing Police will come to your house, break down the door, and arrest you.</p>\n\n<p>Seriously, what do you mean by \"am I allowed\"? Who is going to stop you and how?</p>\n\n<p>The real question is, \"Is this a good idea?\"</p>\n\n<p>There appear to be two issues here: 1. Should you put space between paragraphs? And 2. Should you make a sentence its own paragraph for emphasis.</p>\n\n<p>The answer to #1 is a matter of formatting style. You have to do SOMETHING to show where new paragraphs begin. Sometimes people put space between paragraphs to separate them. Sometimes people indent the first line of each paragraph. Occasionally people put the paragraph symbol, ¶. The first two methods are used routinely and are understand by pretty much anybody who can read English, and are pretty much interchangeable. The only time it matters is if there is some other sort of formatting you are using that makes one or the other difficult to read. Like if you want to use some blank space to show breaks between sections, then also using it to separate paragraphs could make it unclear whether any given break is a section break or a paragraph break.</p>\n\n<p>As to #2, emphasis, like any technique for emphasis, you should use this sparingly. If you are speaking quietly and suddenly you shout, it gets the listeners attention and lets them know that what you said so loudly is important or exciting (at least to you). But if you shout constantly, it's just annoying.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 40920, "author": "John Canon", "author_id": 34322, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/34322", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It sounds like you want to make these 3 sentences memorable. You could end chapter 1 with those 3 sentences, with only slight emphasis like a paragraph break.<br>\nThen put those 3 sentences at the top of chapter 2, possibly in quotation marks. After all, you are quoting from the previous chapter. Other chapters could have nothing, or each one could have a quote from the previous chapter. The quote technique would be like a running start for each chapter.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/40894", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28618/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 44221, "author": "Cyn says make Monica whole", "author_id": 32946, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32946", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Do nothing.</strong></p>\n\n<p>When you create a contract with a traditional publisher, they will tell you what to do. Almost certainly they'll want to use their own ISBNs.</p>\n\n<p>As for the ISBN itself, it's done with.</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><a href=\"https://www.isbn.org/faqs_ownership_rights\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Can an ISBN be reused?</a> No, once a title is published with an\n ISBN on it, the ISBN can never be used again. Even if a title goes out\n of print, the ISBN cannot be reused since the title continues to be\n catalogued by libraries and traded by used booksellers.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>If you'd like ISBNs to use on new self-published titles, you'll need to purchase them fresh.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44263, "author": "Jay", "author_id": 4489, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/4489", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>This is the least of your problems. The hard part is finding a publisher who is interested in publishing your books. Don't worry about it. When you find a publisher, they'll deal with things like ISBNs. It's not your problem.</p>\n\n<p>Once you find a publisher, they'll assign their own ISBNs. You're old ISBNs will simply be dead. Whether the book is then published with the same title or a new title is between you and the publisher. There's no reason why it can't be. Books are republished with the same title and a different ISBN all the time. </p>\n\n<p>You could say that as far as people in the book industry are concerned, a title does not identify a book. An ISBN identifies a book. This is because books can be published in different formats, like paperback and hard cover, with the same title. They'd have different ISBNs. Books that have entered public domain may be published by different companies with the same title, but again, they'll have different ISBN's. And occasionally, two books will be published with the same title but that have nothing to do with each other, it's just coincidence. For example, there's a book titled \"The Stranger\" by Albert Camus, and another book that as far as I know is a completely different book by Greg Van Arsdale and another by Harlan Coben. (I read the Camus book many years ago. I just found the other two searching on Amazon, I have no idea what they're about.)</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/44223", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/37593/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 44451, "author": "Community", "author_id": -1, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/-1", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You use <code>@media</code> rules in your CSS style sheets to define which html tags you want to print and which are only visible on screen. E.g.</p>\n\n<pre><code>@media print {\n .stuff-you-don't-want-to-print {\n display: none;\n }\n}\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>To print the current browser window, you print it with JavaScript, e.g.</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;a href=\"javascript:window.print()\"&gt;Print&lt;/a&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<hr>\n\n<p>The page you link to actually provides a separate web page to print. You can see that the URL of the page you print is different than the URL of the blog post. And if you look at the source code the pages are different. So in fact your \"example\" is an example of what you <em>don't</em> want, when you say that \"[you] don't want to have to create the content twice\". That page <em>has</em> created the content twice.</p>\n\n<p>If you don't want to create the content twice, use media queries.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44452, "author": "user", "author_id": 2533, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/2533", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>CSS supports <a href=\"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media\" rel=\"noreferrer\">media queries</a> since Level 2, Revision 1. That's from <a href=\"https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/REC-CSS2-20110607/\" rel=\"noreferrer\">way back in 2011</a>, so any modern web browser should support it.</p>\n\n<p>If you're able to specify custom CSS, and apply custom CSS classes to your content, then you can define a CSS class such that the pictures and other ancilliary content is shown on screen, but only the actual recipe is printed on paper.</p>\n\n<p>This way, you don't need to have a separate \"printer friendly\" page, because you're using CSS to define what \"printer friendly\" means for your particular content. Of course, it assumes that you have control over the CSS in the first place! The person visiting your web site just prints via their browser's normal \"print\" function.</p>\n\n<p>Specifically, as discussed <a href=\"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queries/Using_media_queries\" rel=\"noreferrer\">on MDN</a>, you can either target <code>print</code> media, or a specific characteristic of a media (a feature). For the former, you'd add something like</p>\n\n<pre><code>@media print {\n img.food-photo { display: none; }\n body { color: black; }\n}\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>to hide <code>food-photo</code> class <code>img</code>s and set the text color to <code>black</code> when the rendering media is identified as <code>print</code>.</p>\n\n<p>For the latter, you can target non-color-capable media (whether screen, print, or otherwise) by writing something like</p>\n\n<pre><code>@media not color /* untested, but looks like it should work */ {\n body { color: black; }\n}\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>to set the text color to <code>black</code> where color is not supported.</p>\n\n<p>These can be combined to form even more complex rules, and of course the normal CSS inheritance rules apply as well, so you can override only those attributes that need to be different between, say, print and non-print.</p>\n\n<p>You might also be interested in CSS <a href=\"https://drafts.csswg.org/css-conditional-3/#at-supports\" rel=\"noreferrer\">feature queries</a>, which look to be similar but geared toward even more specific feature support; for example, <a href=\"https://drafts.csswg.org/css-conditional-3/#typedef-supports-condition\" rel=\"noreferrer\">one example</a> shows how to apply specific CSS depending on whether <code>display: flex</code> is supported. This looks more useful for when you want to know that the user agent (browser) supports a feature, than for targetting specific media types or capabilities.</p>\n\n<p>I came across a Stack Overflow question at <a href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/q/4189868/486504\">What does @media screen and (max-width: 1024px) mean in CSS?</a> which has some more complex examples that you may find enlightening.</p>\n\n<p>I think that <strong>the biggest downside</strong> to using CSS for this is that it leaves the visitor with no easy way to print the whole page <em>including</em> the \"narrative/journey\" if that's what they want to do. There are tricks that one can use, but those by their very nature <em>are</em> rather technical.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44460, "author": "Summer", "author_id": 30375, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30375", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You can put your content into a <code>&lt;div id=\"recipeXYZ\"&gt;</code> nested normally within your blog post. Then you can load the content to a print page dynamically. Now you can print from your original page, with its images and story, or from your print page, which is more printer friendly. You can also modify your recipe from one central location and have it update both pages as they both always receive their content from the same source.</p>\n\n<p>To generate the print page just add the button:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;span id=\"printPreview\"&gt;printer friendly version (requires javascript)&lt;/span&gt;\n\n$(\"#printPreview\").click(function(){\n var w = window.open(); // you can change the dimenstions of the window here.\n w.document.open().write(\"#recipeXYZ\");\n // you probably want to create the actual print button here.\n});\n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44470, "author": "Dustin", "author_id": 22935, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/22935", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<h2>WordPress Answer</h2>\n\n<p>If you're using WordPress, I've got really good news for you. The example that you provided is using a WordPress plugin: <a href=\"https://wordpress.org/plugins/easyrecipe/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://wordpress.org/plugins/easyrecipe/</a></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>Adding a recipe and getting the Recipe View microdata correct is not\n only time consuming but it’s also pretty geeky and most cooks prefer\n to cook and share, not code webpages.</p>\n \n <p>Enter EasyRecipe.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<h2>Non-Wordpress Answer</h2>\n\n<p>If you are not using Wordpress I would give you 3 suggestions</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>If I was blogging recipes, what I would do is that I would create a separate pdf of the easy view and just link to it. While that doesn't synchronize, that's what I would do. </p></li>\n<li><p>If you really want an html page instead of a pdf, You can create a separate blog. And the \"Image and wordy\" blog can reference the \"easy\" recipe blog.</p></li>\n<li>Finally, if neither of those work because you REALLY want the data synced, I would use the other answers already given to use the <strong>@media print</strong> styling.</li>\n</ol>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44473, "author": "henning", "author_id": 14238, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/14238", "pm_score": 4, "selected": false, "text": "<p>TL;DR: Put the important stuff atop.</p>\n\n<p>This isn't the technical solution you were looking for, but it's another way to give both types of readers what they want. </p>\n\n<p>Readers who want the full story will read your blog post regardless of where you place the actual recipe. So why not place it right atop, maybe prefaced with a \"TL;DR\" (too long; didn't read)? Busy readers who just came for the recipe will immediately find what they are looking for and read no further. They can also print your recipe by only selecting the first page.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44495, "author": "corsiKa", "author_id": 1691, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/1691", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In a lot of ways, quests on online games like RuneScape are very much like recipes. I think you could take a page out of their book. Compare the following two pages:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Dragon_Slayer\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Dragon_Slayer</a>\n<a href=\"https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Dragon_Slayer/Quick_guide\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Dragon_Slayer/Quick_guide</a></p>\n\n<p>At the top of each is a snippet that explains that there is a quick guide, or if you're on the quick guide and want the fuller description, that that exists as well. I think this paradigm would work very well for the recipes. </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/siGNR.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/siGNR.png\" alt=\"enter image description here\"></a></p>\n\n<p>One potential issue here is that you have to essentially maintain two separate articles. But one of them, by definition, is pretty slimmed down, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I know this is something you specifically said you didn't want, but I wanted to throw it out there as a form of \"When this problem came up, here's a solution for it in the wild that seems to actually work well.\"</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44500, "author": "undefined", "author_id": 35632, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/35632", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>disclaimer: I'm not, in anyway, associated with the printfriendly company.</strong></p>\n\n<p>I found the printfriendly plugin pretty useful and easy to implement. It is a small script you can add to your website and it displays a print (and an optional pdf/mail) button.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://www.printfriendly.com/about\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://www.printfriendly.com/about</a></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p><strong>quote form their website:</strong> <br>\n PrintFriendly cleans and formats web pages for perfect print experience. PrintFriendly removes ads, navigation and web page junk, so you save paper and ink when you print. It's free and easy to use. Perfect to use at home, the office, or whenever you need to print a web page.</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p><br>\nI created a (quick and dirty, sorry for that) <a href=\"http://undefined.bplaced.net/testseite4/index.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">test page</a> where I included this script:</p>\n\n<p>Here we see the test page with the included printfriendly button:\n<br><br>\n<a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/sOYKj.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/sOYKj.jpg\" alt=\"printfriendly button included\"></a>\n<br><br><br>\nHere is the page setup dialog which appears after one clicked the print button. You are able to delete various parts of the page you want to print:\n<br><br>\n<a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/PdX56.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/PdX56.jpg\" alt=\"printfriendly page setup\"></a>\n<br><br><br>\nThis is the output pdf generated by the script:\n<br><br>\n<a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/TlT6K.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/TlT6K.jpg\" alt=\"printfriendly pdf result\"></a>\n<br><br><br>\nOf course, everybody should check if this works on his website and if all data protection stuff is okay for his needs.\n<br><br>\nFor me, the advantage of this solution is that you don't need to manage two versions of the content or mess around with more or less difficult CSS.\n<br><br>\nA potential downside could be GDPR related issues in the free version. There is also a payed version which claims to be GDPR compliant.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/44450", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/1993/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 44771, "author": "Jon", "author_id": 38943, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/38943", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I think you're correct in that there isn't necessarily a right or wrong way to do it, what matters is that someone reading it is able to follow it easily. The way I would perhaps treat them is to treat the visions as separate scenes with a parentheses indicating their status as visions as can be done for dream sequences. I'm not too fond of the 'back to scene' tag as I don't feel it really tells the reader anything. So for example I might try something like the below for what you have:</p>\n\n<p>EXT. HOMESTEAD - DAY</p>\n\n<p>Bob slowly averts his eyes toward the trees.</p>\n\n<p>EXT. RANCH - AFTERNOON (VISION SEQ)</p>\n\n<p>Hands bend a thick rope into a loop.</p>\n\n<p>EXT. HOMESTEAD - DAY</p>\n\n<p>Eyes down again....</p>\n\n<p>Seems like it might be more flexible for moving scenes around. </p>\n\n<p>If these visions are occurring a lot throughout the scene and form a continuous scene on their own then you could also use an intercut: introduce the scene headings at the beginning and then have a heading saying INTERCUT BETWEEN...etc.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44772, "author": "Chris Sunami", "author_id": 10479, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10479", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If you are cutting back and before between two scenes, you can use \"INTERCUT\"</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://www.screenwriting.info/15.php\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">http://www.screenwriting.info/15.php</a></p>\n\n<blockquote>\n <p>EXT. HILLSIDE - DAY<br>\n Bob slowly averts his eyes towards the trees.</p>\n \n <p>EXT. GALLOWS - NIGHT<br>\n EXECUTIONER, whose face is unseen, prepares the gallows for a hanging.</p>\n \n <p>INTERCUT BETWEEN HILLSIDE AND GALLOWS</p>\n \n <p>Bob drops his eyes down again.</p>\n \n <p>The executioner's hands bend a thick rope into a loop.</p>\n \n <p>Bob grimaces.</p>\n \n <p>A noose sways in the breeze. Heavy off-beat BREATHING.</p>\n \n <p>Bob puts his head down. Winces.</p>\n</blockquote>\n" }, { "answer_id": 46612, "author": "Fleurette Edwards VanGulden", "author_id": 40187, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/40187", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You could also consider avoiding setting up a flashback as such. The idea is to use elements of your present scene to show the few relevant details of the flashback.</p>\n\n<p>For instance: in a scene I had water from a fountain morphing to a past scene, with quick flashes seen through the character's eyes which I labeled 'Recall'.</p>\n\n<p>My goal was to avoid the setting/location change. This works the audience was previously shown the occurrence of the events, during which the character had been standing at a window in full view but without showing any reaction.</p>\n\n<p>The character's reaction at the end of the <em>recall</em> shows the audience what he has seen. In my scene this served to tell the audience, and the character, that he had indeed witnessed the face of his wife's killer, a fact that was previously not shown. I further confirm this by making him utter, 'I've seen you, Lin was right. I loved you but you took my family from me.' This is how he realizes there wasn't an accidental fire but arson and the arsonist wasn't among the fatalities but alive.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 48296, "author": "Frank", "author_id": 41432, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/41432", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't think there is a right or wrong way of doing it, so long as what you are doing is clear, concise, and consistent throughout the rest of your script. I also get caught up over specific ways to format things until realizing that there are specific rules to screenwriting, everything else are just guidelines used to help you set it up in your own way. </p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/44650", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/37516/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 45044, "author": "CashewsFuel", "author_id": 37596, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/37596", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<h2>My bestie, when converting Ebooks, is Calibre.</h2>\n\n<p>I use it mainly to load .epub files on my Kobo (usually converting from <strong>.pdf or .doc</strong>).</p>\n\n<p>You have so many options to control formatting. You can also export to <strong>.mobi</strong> and view it on your Kindle if you own one (or also just check the given preview).</p>\n\n<p>Calibre also has an integrated reader for Ebooks.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/EWftR.png\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/EWftR.png\" alt=\"Settings available\"></a></p>\n\n<p>Hope this can helps out.\nHere you can find the free program:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://calibre-ebook.com/download\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://calibre-ebook.com/download</a></p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 45679, "author": "ZioByte", "author_id": 25977, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25977", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I have not been able to find any suitable Markup, so I started coding it myself.</p>\n\n<p>A very preliminary version is available on <a href=\"https://gitlab.com/mcondarelli/markright\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">GitLab</a>.</p>\n\n<p>Any feedback would be VERY welcome.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/44796", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25977/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 44860, "author": "GGx", "author_id": 28942, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28942", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I'm not sure it's the ebook buyers who are the silly ones here.</p>\n\n<p>Of course people judge a book by its cover, as they should. To navigate the thousands or millions of books on a real or virtual shelf, a reader needs a guide. A good cover will convey genre and hint at the story inside. It sets an expectation for the reader that this story will fall inside the category of books they generally enjoy reading.</p>\n\n<p>Once that's done, the blurb will then confirm those expectations by letting the reader know a little more about the story while making a promise of what they have to look forward to if they buy.</p>\n\n<p>Some readers look inside, read the first paragraph or even the first few pages, but some like to buy and be surprised.</p>\n\n<p>However, at this point, the author has gained the reader's trust. Expectations have been set and promises have been made. It is up to the author to prove that the money spent was worthwhile.</p>\n\n<p>The silly ones are authors who believe that a great cover and blurb are enough to mask a turd and make them money. Sure, they've made one sale (unless the customer is so angry, they return it), but they've also made sure that the reader will never pick up another book they've written or tell a single soul about it (unless it's to say 'Don't buy that book!').</p>\n\n<p>Very few writers make money from one book. The silly ones are the authors who think a strategy of fooling readers by failing to meet the expectations set by a great cover and blurb is enough to build a career.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44872, "author": "Terri Simon", "author_id": 19423, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/19423", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<blockquote>\n <p>Is it really true that many ebook buyers are silly enough to purchase a book simply because of its cover (and blurb) without first sampling the actual writing inside the book?</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>I wouldn't use the word \"silly\" here, personally, because people have to wade through a ton of available material. There is a hierarchy of what people will find interesting when looking for a book. Cover and title are the first things they see. A crappy cover or title will mean that the book is just skimmed over. Covers, by their style, can also indicate a category of book (science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery), so it isn't just about a pretty picture, there should be something informational there. If the title and cover are intriguing enough, people will read the blurb. The reviews may come next or possibly a quick look inside, but if the blurb is good enough <em>and the book is cheap enough</em> that book may get sucked into the ebook collection. Goodness knows I have a bunch of things on my Kindle I don't really remember buying. </p>\n\n<p>The second phase is, does that book actually get started? And does it get finished? As @GGx mentioned, it isn't just about that first book. If I spend that small chunk of change to buy the book and then I actually read it, what are the odds I'll pick up the next one? In a world where you can grab an ebook for less than a cup of coffee, it's not a big deal for a reader to pick up a book (talking here about lower cost items, like from Bookbub or finding something under $3 while browsing). But if the book is crap, it won't get finished, or it will get bad reviews, or just anything else from that author will be off the radar. On the other hand, I've picked up books based on the cover and the blurb, loved them, and then gleefully spent more money on the rest of the series.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 44873, "author": "Cyn says make Monica whole", "author_id": 32946, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32946", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Yes and no.</p>\n\n<p>I don't think many people purchase a book because of the cover. The cover will not give you direct sales (maybe a couple...).</p>\n\n<p>But imagine that you are looking for a book. Either knowing you want to buy something now or just browsing and seeing if something catches your eye. You're wandering through a bookstore where there are a couple thousand books to choose from. You might narrow it down by choosing fiction vs nonfiction or by picking a genre. Or not. </p>\n\n<p>Depending on how much time you have, you'll pick up maybe 30-50 different books to give them a closer look (reading the title and author and looking carefully at the cover). </p>\n\n<p>For a few of those, you'll read the blurbs on the back cover and inside jacket sides. You might even page through the book a bit. That is when you'll decide yes, no, maybe.</p>\n\n<p>Then you'll buy one (or two or zero) from the ones you picked up. Books you pick up only have a few percent chance that you'll buy them. But books you don't pick up have a zero percent chance.</p>\n\n<p>What gets you to pick up a book? Two things:</p>\n\n<ol>\n<li>The spine (if the book is shelved)</li>\n<li>The cover (if the book is displayed)</li>\n</ol>\n\n<p>What gets you to evaluate a book (read blurbs, etc)? Probably the cover and the title are the biggest things (unless your name is familiar).</p>\n\n<p>If you're looking at books online, then the title and cover are right up front. Both of those things are going to be what gets you to look further at the blurbs, author name, and reviews (or at least the number of stars). Here the cover is also vital for getting you to \"pick the book up.\" </p>\n\n<p><strong>Once a reader has your book in her/his hands (or open on her/his screen), you have a chance at a sale. And that's what the cover will do.</strong></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/44850", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/32086/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 47780, "author": "Rrr", "author_id": 10746, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10746", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Sometimes the department (or school of graduate studies at you institution) will have a very specific set of style guidelines for theses -- check there first. After that, go to your institution's library and have a look at previous theses in your discipline. If there is no specific guidance there, refer to the style guides for the journals in your discipline. Also consider talking with the post-docs and researchers in your supervisor's group. Should all that fail, hash-out a structure yourself, then bring all the leg-work you've done to your supervisor, and ask for their opinion.</p>\n\n<p>(PS: Congrats on your approaching submission!)</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 47799, "author": "Chris H", "author_id": 30065, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30065", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Where I did <a href=\"https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&amp;uin=uk.bl.ethos.627918\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">my PhD</a> there were no relevant guidelines; such a level of detail in submission guidelines is uncommon in the UK. I stuck to my usual rule of academic writing: <em>be clear and help the reader</em>. Each main piece of code was a section (in one code-appendix) with a descriptive title that appeared in the ToC:</p>\n\n<pre><code>Appendix A Analysis source code\n A.1 Peak picking code\n A.2 Thermal simulation spatial averaging code\n A.3 EL hotspot image analysis code\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Coming up with short captions (to go in lists of figures, tables, etc.) is something you're likely to be doing anyway as you polish the thesis.</p>\n\n<p>As an aside, I suggest you introduce each bit of code in your appendices (however well it's described in the body, and however well it's commented inline) as you would caption a figure so it makes sense on its own. You've probably already done this.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/47777", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/41048/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 50466, "author": "Sarah Bowman", "author_id": 43102, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43102", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You are not \"overthinking,\" though perhaps you are in need of encouragement to keep writing. Many others have had these self-same questions. In my research and reading to learn \"how to write\" I came across the idea of writing a \"character Bible.\" </p>\n\n<p><strong>Character Bible and Wardrobe Charts</strong></p>\n\n<p>A character Bible is a set of files in which one writes up all the details about each character such as gender, age, height, interests, place in family, and all the important milestones in that person's life. This may include items that don't enter the story but help make the character who they are. For characters in serials, this is especially important so that the author can go check if Tom had glasses in Book 2 or if that only happened in Book 4. Or maybe it was Harry who had the glasses and Tom who wore a baseball hat everywhere he went, even to church if his wife--or was it his mother--let him. </p>\n\n<p>You mention \"forgetting details.\" This means you had them in your head and/or imagination at one point. Write them down right away. No need to draw; write them down in all their tedious detail. Make a list or chart if that is helpful. People divide their wardrobes into headgear, tops (e.g. shirts, blouses, jackets), bottoms (e.g. slacks, pants, jeans), footwear (different kinds of footwear for different purposes), accessories (e.g. ties, scarves). </p>\n\n<p>I am not into clothes for my characters--they just wear the same drab stuff all the time with a focus on what's going on, but some authors dress their characters in different clothes every day. If you want to do that, I can visualize a chart for each character. Across the top, write the different categories of the wardrobe and down the side write the names of items, leaving room to list a variety of jeans, shorts, slacks, etc. Then, when it comes time to dress Tom for the government meeting or Therese for the party, all you have to do is go into the \"closet\" aka chart and pick from what's there. </p>\n\n<p><strong>Using Pictures</strong></p>\n\n<p>I use pictures, too, for clothing. Since I'm writing about people in earlier decades, I'll ask Google for \"girl's dress 1960s\" or \"men's clothes 1940s.\" That tends to bring up Sears catalogue pages from the years requested. For the centuries before photographs, it tends to be paintings. I have not gone back far enough to need pottery or cave engravings but I think that's where information of the very ancient styles come from. To not infringe on copyright of contemporary photographs, one can pick and choose elements of the garments to describe. You are not reproducing the photograph.</p>\n\n<p><strong>How Much Description</strong></p>\n\n<p>This brings us to another of your questions: How much description is required? </p>\n\n<p>I personally don't like reading long detailed descriptions of clothing when I'm dying to know who killed the corpse we met in Chapter 1. A friend suggested to use just enough detail to get the reader thinking in the right direction. Let readers fill it in with their own imagination. </p>\n\n<p>For example, Tom with the baseball cap in church was probably wearing some kind of pants and footwear though we are never told. I'm making this up as I go. All we know is that he was in a t-shirt with a tie and baseball cap when his mother caught him going out the door. Given that description of his dress from the waist up (I'd add colour and design in a real story), reader imagination will dress him from the waist down. We want to know what happens when this guy gets to church, especially if it's a traditional suit-and-tie congregation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Describing A Large Group</strong></p>\n\n<p>Don't try to describe every person in a crowd of a hundred people. Describing the six key men in your group is enough. Authors use various techniques to describe groups. Often they start with a characteristic everyone had in common, then add a bit more to give the reader a general idea. Include enough detail to carry the plot. Maybe all six men carried a briefcase or wore a tie. Maybe in your large crowd everyone is wearing a uniform or religious symbol or is \"prepared to take a stand.\" You can use clothing and body postures to set the atmosphere of the scene (calm, tense, angry, joyful, etc.). For example, a scene with a priest who boldly displays his cross and a lawyer who pushes out the chest of his expensive suit as he struts up to him with a briefcase both describes people and suggests conflict. </p>\n\n<p><strong>How I Get The Details Down</strong></p>\n\n<p>You ask how I get the details down. Often the details are the last thing I add to the scene. I'll visualize in my head the exact location (room, lawn, etc.) where the characters are, what else is in their immediate environment, what tools they are using, what clothing they are wearing. Then I'll add enough to make the scene come alive as described above. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50468, "author": "JRE", "author_id": 40124, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/40124", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>You are overthinking it. </p>\n\n<p>As a reader, I mostly don't give a rat's patootie about what most of the characters look like or how they dress. </p>\n\n<p>There's a handful of important characters that you will describe in detail in your novel - and you will have described them in bits and pieces throughout the story. I don't need a long winded description of those characters in a scene. </p>\n\n<p>As for the others (new characters introduced in the scene,) I don't want to be flooded with details that impede the flow. A short description that gives a (very) quick sketch of the character's personality is all that fits.</p>\n\n<p>Examples:</p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Your \"military leader\" who shows up in a fancied up, non-regulation silk version of the standard uniform is of questionable quality as a commander.</li>\n<li>Your \"religious\" leader who has a couple of heavily armed \"choir boys\" in attendance is probably more than a simple preacher - this character may give the \"military leader\" a really tough opponent to deal with.</li>\n<li>The \"low ranking official\" wearing a suit of better quality (finest material, tailor made) than the supposed head of the government might be the \"power behind the throne.\"</li>\n</ul>\n\n<p>Details are to help the reader understand the characters. You want to think in terms of sketches rather than paintings - the minimum of detail necessary make an impression.</p>\n\n<p>Give your readers a framework, and let them fill in the finer details themselves. It is boring as <strong>F</strong> to read pages upon pages of details that the reader will forget or ignore anyway.</p>\n\n<p>I'm not reading your novel to see how well you can describe a physical scene.</p>\n\n<p>I'm reading your novel to see the ideas and concepts you are presenting. </p>\n\n<p>If you have nothing to say, the level of detail of your (physical) character descriptions won't help - I'll skip all the fluff, figure out that you're telling me pointless anecdotes, and toss your book in the pile of \"don't bother, can be used for kindling in the fireplace.\"</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50469, "author": "Chris Sunami", "author_id": 10479, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10479", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Details have always been my biggest weakness. After several years of work, I've finally built them up into a strength. While visual aids and models can help, there are a few other things that I've found very helpful and effective:</p>\n\n<p>1) <strong>Work on being more observant.</strong> You can't write what you don't notice. Take some time in your daily life to fall in love with the visual details all around you.</p>\n\n<p>2) Put some <strong>emotion/foreshadowing/attitude</strong> into your details. \"He wore a blue shirt. He wore a red belt\" is boring. Sure it's visual detail, but it doesn't really take you anywhere. No wonder it's tough to write! How about \"His shirt was the peaceful blue of a cloudless sky. But his belt was as crimson as fresh blood.\" Much more interesting, to read AND to write.</p>\n\n<p>3) The last one is one I learned here, from the great @MarkBaker. <strong>Every detail can be a mini-story</strong>. \"The trees were an army of straight-backed soldiers, in muddy brown uniforms\" is a strong visual image, but it's also an intriguing mini-story.</p>\n\n<p>When you get away from seeing visual description as a hoop to jump through, a boring catalog of details to check off, you begin to realize it's a palette for your storytelling --a way of putting the reader right in the center of the action. Nor should it just be visuals. <strong>Get sound, smell, taste and feel in there too</strong>. I can report firsthand, it really improves the way readers respond to your writing.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/50470", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/40526/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 50544, "author": "JKim", "author_id": 43572, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43572", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I've done legal transcription for a number of different jurisdictions and I've never seen a style guide that permits this. It's either verbatim transcription or minor edits to correct false starts, messy construction and that sort of thing.</p>\n\n<p>There have been many times I've felt that tone was important to the meaning, and I feel your pain... but it's just not done in the legal sector. As an impartial third-party seeing an example of what you're attempting, I think it damages the credibility of the document if you show your value judgements in there.</p>\n\n<p>Maybe you could mark for your own notes the exchanges that need elaboration or explanation, so if it comes down to argument, you have something to argue (or introduce an audio clip as evidence).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50574, "author": "Bronson", "author_id": 43591, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43591", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I don't do transcripts, but speaking as a layperson, what you've written already seems to communicate a strident tone on part of EA. If you can get away with [angry], you might be able to get away with [strident], but if I were you I would err on the side of JKim and defer to their expertise. </p>\n\n<p>Even \"EA scoffs and visibly rolls her eyes\" struck me as a little over the top, though again, take my reply with a pinch of salt. What I can say with relative certainty is that if you put too much emphasis on the poor conduct of the opposing counsel, people may infer that you aren't being impartial. Remember, we all have biases, and which facts you omit can be just as important as which facts you include. How many of B's facial expressions are you documenting? Mind you, I'm not saying EA was in the right, just urging caution.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/50541", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43567/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 50594, "author": "Zeiss Ikon", "author_id": 26297, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26297", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Common mass market paperbacks run between 250 and 400 words per page, so if you're aiming for the same density of type, 90,000 words would run to around 300 pages, give or take 20% or so.</p>\n\n<p>Manuscripts today don't have to adhere to \"standard manuscript format\" as was the case for nearly a century, from the invention of the typewriter until e-publishing rose. It's often more sensible to write in the final format you expect your reader to see, if page layout, potential illustration, and such things are important to you.</p>\n\n<p><em>Carrie</em> was almost certainly submitted to a traditional publisher, on paper, double spaced, Pica type, with minimum one inch margins and a half page white space on the title page and for each chapter break. That formatting was intended to make slush readers' lives easier, by giving a very quick easy reason to reject a manuscript from a clueless new writer, as well as to leave space on the page for markup by an actual editor if it ever reached one. With modern technology, you can potentially bypass all those steps and do everything yourself (or contract out things like copy editing, content editing, proofreader, etc.).</p>\n\n<p>So, comparing to the manuscript for <em>Carrie</em> isn't really sensible -- but if you want to see how your book will look in paperback, you can easily set up your word processor's page layout to match that in a trade or mass market paperback -- page size, proportional fonts, kerning, line justification, as much effort as you want to go through.</p>\n\n<p>My own suggestion is to not worry about it while you're composing; save that part of the job for after the <em>story</em> is done and you're turning the <em>completed story</em> into a <em>book</em> (whether for print or e-publication).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50595, "author": "JRosebrookMaye", "author_id": 42900, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42900", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It depends on the trim size but for a typical 6x9 Trade Paperback Book, this should translate to around 400 pages. I just printed a book that was 98,000 words and it was above 400 pages. Now, on Microsoft Word with a trim size of 8.5 x 11, this translate to about 300 pages. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50600, "author": "raddevus", "author_id": 10723, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10723", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>The generally accepted standard is to consider 250 words one page so : </p>\n\n<pre><code>WordCount / 250 = TotalPageCount \n</code></pre>\n\n<p>or in your case 90,000 / 250 = 360 pages.</p>\n\n<p>Of course if you want to calculate number of words from page count just flip it around:</p>\n\n<pre><code>250 * TotalPageCount = WordCount\n</code></pre>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972</a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/50593", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42950/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 50594, "author": "Zeiss Ikon", "author_id": 26297, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26297", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Common mass market paperbacks run between 250 and 400 words per page, so if you're aiming for the same density of type, 90,000 words would run to around 300 pages, give or take 20% or so.</p>\n\n<p>Manuscripts today don't have to adhere to \"standard manuscript format\" as was the case for nearly a century, from the invention of the typewriter until e-publishing rose. It's often more sensible to write in the final format you expect your reader to see, if page layout, potential illustration, and such things are important to you.</p>\n\n<p><em>Carrie</em> was almost certainly submitted to a traditional publisher, on paper, double spaced, Pica type, with minimum one inch margins and a half page white space on the title page and for each chapter break. That formatting was intended to make slush readers' lives easier, by giving a very quick easy reason to reject a manuscript from a clueless new writer, as well as to leave space on the page for markup by an actual editor if it ever reached one. With modern technology, you can potentially bypass all those steps and do everything yourself (or contract out things like copy editing, content editing, proofreader, etc.).</p>\n\n<p>So, comparing to the manuscript for <em>Carrie</em> isn't really sensible -- but if you want to see how your book will look in paperback, you can easily set up your word processor's page layout to match that in a trade or mass market paperback -- page size, proportional fonts, kerning, line justification, as much effort as you want to go through.</p>\n\n<p>My own suggestion is to not worry about it while you're composing; save that part of the job for after the <em>story</em> is done and you're turning the <em>completed story</em> into a <em>book</em> (whether for print or e-publication).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50595, "author": "JRosebrookMaye", "author_id": 42900, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42900", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It depends on the trim size but for a typical 6x9 Trade Paperback Book, this should translate to around 400 pages. I just printed a book that was 98,000 words and it was above 400 pages. Now, on Microsoft Word with a trim size of 8.5 x 11, this translate to about 300 pages. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50600, "author": "raddevus", "author_id": 10723, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10723", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>The generally accepted standard is to consider 250 words one page so : </p>\n\n<pre><code>WordCount / 250 = TotalPageCount \n</code></pre>\n\n<p>or in your case 90,000 / 250 = 360 pages.</p>\n\n<p>Of course if you want to calculate number of words from page count just flip it around:</p>\n\n<pre><code>250 * TotalPageCount = WordCount\n</code></pre>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972</a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/50615", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43652/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 50594, "author": "Zeiss Ikon", "author_id": 26297, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26297", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Common mass market paperbacks run between 250 and 400 words per page, so if you're aiming for the same density of type, 90,000 words would run to around 300 pages, give or take 20% or so.</p>\n\n<p>Manuscripts today don't have to adhere to \"standard manuscript format\" as was the case for nearly a century, from the invention of the typewriter until e-publishing rose. It's often more sensible to write in the final format you expect your reader to see, if page layout, potential illustration, and such things are important to you.</p>\n\n<p><em>Carrie</em> was almost certainly submitted to a traditional publisher, on paper, double spaced, Pica type, with minimum one inch margins and a half page white space on the title page and for each chapter break. That formatting was intended to make slush readers' lives easier, by giving a very quick easy reason to reject a manuscript from a clueless new writer, as well as to leave space on the page for markup by an actual editor if it ever reached one. With modern technology, you can potentially bypass all those steps and do everything yourself (or contract out things like copy editing, content editing, proofreader, etc.).</p>\n\n<p>So, comparing to the manuscript for <em>Carrie</em> isn't really sensible -- but if you want to see how your book will look in paperback, you can easily set up your word processor's page layout to match that in a trade or mass market paperback -- page size, proportional fonts, kerning, line justification, as much effort as you want to go through.</p>\n\n<p>My own suggestion is to not worry about it while you're composing; save that part of the job for after the <em>story</em> is done and you're turning the <em>completed story</em> into a <em>book</em> (whether for print or e-publication).</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50595, "author": "JRosebrookMaye", "author_id": 42900, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42900", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It depends on the trim size but for a typical 6x9 Trade Paperback Book, this should translate to around 400 pages. I just printed a book that was 98,000 words and it was above 400 pages. Now, on Microsoft Word with a trim size of 8.5 x 11, this translate to about 300 pages. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 50600, "author": "raddevus", "author_id": 10723, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10723", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>The generally accepted standard is to consider 250 words one page so : </p>\n\n<pre><code>WordCount / 250 = TotalPageCount \n</code></pre>\n\n<p>or in your case 90,000 / 250 = 360 pages.</p>\n\n<p>Of course if you want to calculate number of words from page count just flip it around:</p>\n\n<pre><code>250 * TotalPageCount = WordCount\n</code></pre>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=608972</a></p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/50623", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/11428/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 51509, "author": "rolfedh", "author_id": 15838, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/15838", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Typically, the title of a procedural topic uses the gerund of the verb. For example, \"Checking...\" However, this can vary by organization and depends on the style guide or conventions your organization has established. </p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 51841, "author": "ash", "author_id": 45058, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/45058", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>The accepted answer is correct of course, but I want to add that you can also use the &quot;How to&quot; construction:</p>\n<pre><code>4. How to check whether a key exists\n5. How to retrieve a value\n6. How to check whether variable or function is True or False\n</code></pre>\n<p>This phrasing is also used in procedural topics, though less common.</p>\n<p>Versions 1 and 3 are usually used in procedures themselves:</p>\n<pre><code>To check whether a key exists:\n1. Open the registry editor.\n2. ...\n</code></pre>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/51506", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/44669/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 54343, "author": "hszmv", "author_id": 25666, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/25666", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Depends on your definition of &quot;serious.&quot; If you mean will people be engaged with the plot and have emotional reactions to the characters, that's a bit difficult to say. It really depends on what conflict you're creating to layer over the source material's narrative and how you write the characters. If you're going for the feel of the web-video genre, the reason it became popular was the genre making series &quot;Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridge Series&quot; relied on the target audience having working knowledge of the original series of &quot;Yu-Gi-Oh&quot; as dubbed by 4Kids Entertainment as well as various production notes and behind the scenes tidbits (for example, the heavy and ridiculous censurship used for American sensabilities, such as replacing situations where characters were essentially gambling with their lives in a &quot;Children's Card Game&quot; into a &quot;less&quot; threatening magical dimension which removes your soul from your body and tourtures it for eternity but doesn't actually kill you. Or the fact that the first arc was written before the actual rules for the featured game were written, thus creating impossible manuvers that work on very flimsy logics.). In addition, there is an alignment with the plots of both shows (such as the Kiba Corp Board of Directors becoming 4Kids Board of Directors, both of which have coorparte greed as a themed vice, but the later allows more of the staple meta-humor jokes to be made.).</p>\n<p>Before Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridge series, there was an &quot;proto-type&quot; of the abridge series that came out called &quot;Samurai Pizza Cats&quot; which was the U.S. dub of the Japanese Anime &quot;Kyattou Ninden Teyandee&quot; (lit. Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee (Edo period slang that has no translation in English. Think of it as whatever the late 19th century vershion of shouting &quot;Aaaargh&quot; would be, which is how it was used in the series by the leader of the team)). As even Pizza Cat's own theme song notes, when the series was sent to U.S. distributors from Japan, the U.S. dub team found to their horror that someone in Japan had never bothered to send the scripts. While the original series was never intended to be taken serious, just by looking at the bizzare things that happen, the dubbing team put on their &quot;writer&quot; hats and started making a gag dub of the series that the rest of the non-japanese speaking world liked much better than the original series it was based off of. This pre-dated the Pokemon fueled Japanese anime invasion of the late 90s and 00s, much less youtube.</p>\n<p>Even then, there are examples that aren't crossing language barriers. &quot;The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged)&quot; takes works of the Bard himself, and condenses them into a two-act play (the same format Shakespeares plays follow). Famously, Family Guy did three episodes that retold the original Star Wars Trilogy with a mocking yet loving tone, which did a much reduced telling to fit the tv format.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 54355, "author": "user2352714", "author_id": 43118, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/43118", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Let me tell you what happened from someone who's tried it. I was once writing a series with the intent to make it seem like an abridged series but in written form. The characters were in a stereotypical fantasy plot but snarked at each other and poked fun at the (intentionally constructed) plot holes in their setting. They would make stupid banter with the villains and do dumb stuff that seemed more in-line with a Dungeons and Dragons campaign than a fantasy novel. The idea was to point out that a bunch of friends saving the world would be acting a lot more like the Z Fighters in DBZA, with their own in-jokes, quirks, making constant references to pop culture, and such (I mean, look at how people today talk), than the super-dour and grim depictions seen in most media that completely scrub any reference to contemporary culture to avoid lawsuits and dating the work.</p>\n<p><strong>It failed. Miserably.</strong></p>\n<p>After doing a plot autopsy I came to several conclusions as to why the story failed to work. First is that humor is hard. It's easy to write a story where everyone is serious but humor is so tailored to the individual that what one person finds funny another person will not. So it's hard to make jokes land. Team Four Star has even mentioned this in saying that jokes from early DBZA and Hellsing Abridged seem painfully awkward and politically incorrect now.</p>\n<p>The second issue is I tried to balance horror tropes and general scariness and it failed miserably. The intent was that main characters would snark with/at the monsters but the monsters were still scary in their own right. The problem is that in stories you can be silly or serious, but not both at the same time. One usually comes at the cost of the other. This is why most stories have the comedy in the first act and the drama in the second. Some abridged series <em>have</em> balanced levity and seriousness. Cell in DBZA is the prime example. Many people have noticed that when Cell showed up on screen in DBZA the humor toned down and things became more serious. And even then Cell was only funny by engaging in a brand of humor so dark it made Mr. Popo take notice. Trying to do both will give your readers narrative whiplash.</p>\n<p>Using an abridged-style tone throughout your series means your readers never get &quot;engrossed&quot; in the plot. The constant jokes relieve tension (which is why people IRL joke in stressful situations, in fact). The fact that the characters don't take the danger seriously means the readers never do as well. The characters could be in a legitimately life-and-death situation, but the fact they are cracking jokes means the audience never feels that way. On a related note this is a common criticism of the &quot;Whedonesque&quot; style seen in many Marvel movie, for the exact same reason. It deflates tension and makes the movie &quot;bland&quot;. There is a time to be serious and a time to be funny. The audience looks to character behavior as a &quot;cue&quot; to inform them how they should feel.</p>\n<p>Another aspect of why abridged series are often funny is <em>because</em> the original authors took them so seriously. Look at the four most popular abridged series of all time: <em>Hellsing Ultimate Abridged</em>, <em>Dragonball Z Abridged</em>, <em>Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series</em>, and <em>Sword Art Online Abridged</em>. What do all of them have in common? Their plots are all treated with utter seriousness by the original authors but they have a ton of goofy plot holes (&quot;children's card games&quot;, power levels/episode progression, a lot in <em>Sword Art Online</em>) Heck, <em>Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series</em> made a running gag out of the fact that battles for the fate of the world, global geopolitics, and the creation of prestigious academies were determined by &quot;children's card games&quot;. It's much harder to make something funny for its own merits compared to poking fun at what already exists. This is why people find <em>true</em> opinions expressed by crazy people online funny but knowingly fake opinions aren't. We find it funny not because of what's being said, but out of the idea that someone is nuts enough to legitimately believe this.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 54404, "author": "Erin Tesden", "author_id": 48340, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/48340", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Hmm, I think it could work.</p>\n<p>To say the truth, the way your formulated your questions is quite weird. I mean, there are hundred of examples you could have used, but you choose the abridged series, when there are a lot of books that parody and make an splendid work at making jabs at the inconcistencies and general stupidness of certain genres of fiction.</p>\n<p>Actually, you just remind me this that did it with your typical fantasy world based on Tolkien, with a lot of drarfs as the main characters.</p>\n<p>There was this scene pre-war with the chief/king making a great speech to rise the morale of his soldiers while riding his horse. However, being more &quot;realistic&quot;, it happened the guy´s voice didnt carried away enough, so the characters were missunderstanding everything he was saying.</p>\n<p>The king spoke of them fighting with everything and dying with honor, while the characters understood something like &quot;He said we are all fucking die.&quot;</p>\n<p>It was hilarious.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/54338", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/48277/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 55116, "author": "SF.", "author_id": 4291, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/4291", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p><strong>Show, don't tell.</strong> Narrator saying &quot;His uncle was content about...&quot; is committing first degree sin against this rule. Filtering the same through thoughts of a character alleviates most of the weight of this sin, although it would be better to have the contentment being displayed through behavioral sins instead.</p>\n<p>You seem to use a third-person omniscient narrator. This is the easiest option to write, of them all, and as result the easiest to made cheesy, abusing the omniscience, telling things that without being shown would remain unknown otherwise.</p>\n<p>It's much easier to get away with this when narrating in first person. In this case you can mix narration and internal dialogue freely, omitting quote marks and achieving pretty juicy and light-hearted style when the narration becomes indistinguishable from internal dialogue and suddenly gets in the way of common events to comical effects (a lengthy paragraph of deep introspection ending rapidly with &quot;ouch&quot; as the protagonist walks into a lamp post because he was so lost in thoughts he stopped paying attention.) It also helps a lot with smooth building of mood, state of mind and general condition of the narrator, through creating specific <em>flaws</em> in perception and thought process caused by these factors.</p>\n<p>Introducing these techniques in third person omniscient is pretty hard and rarely smooth. You're stuck with either quoting or reporting - and as you noticed correctly, &quot; the first series of example are more proffessional... But because of that reason a lot more dry.&quot; Yes, professional as in a report, not a novel or a story.</p>\n<p>The writer's craft is primarily about evoking specific feelings in the reader. Nobody cares about accurate and clear representation of fictional events in a fictional world they don't feel attached to in any way. The events, the world, are vessels, tools to deliver the feelings - awe, amusement, nostalgia, apprehension, whichever your work is aiming at. So you must deliver them in a way that works for these feelings. Plain <em>reporting</em> is a way to &quot;keep it professional&quot; and strip the text of all emotions, so the antithesis of the writer's art.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 55124, "author": "EDL", "author_id": 39219, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/39219", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>With regard to indirect thought and direct thought we can take a page from Shakespeare.</p>\n<pre><code> there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.\n Hamlet, Act, 2 Scene 2\n</code></pre>\n<p>It is how it is used that decides whether it is good or bad.</p>\n<p>Indirect thought, like indirect speech, is in the narrator's voice, and written in the same tense as the narration. Since it doesn't come from the character, is a form of concision or summary, in that it doesn't strictly move in real-time. Albeit, the time ratio can be anything; from 1:1 (real-time), 10:1 (time passing fast), or 1:100 (time slowing down). When used well, summary moves the story forward quickly because it can directly speak of conflict in the story without, necessarily, feeling like expository information.</p>\n<p>Direct thought, like direct speech is in the character's voice, and is written in present tense. Since it is exactly what a character is thinking, or saying, it is in real time, and works well with beats -- statements of character action to establish a sense of motion and filling space.</p>\n<p>The two can be mixed together to create an engaging, emotional distance with the character and vary the rate of time passing to establish tension and suspense in the story.</p>\n<p>That said, either can be used to make abysmal writing and agonizing story telling -- and not in a good way. If your words make for engaging sentences and your choices of what to share in summary/concision and what belongs in scene/real-time, then both direct thought and indirect thought are effective techniques.</p>\n<p>Always keep in mind that they call it 'storytelling' and not 'story-showing' for a reason. And there are no fixed rules about how to do things or express things. There are patterns and expected forms certainly. They exist because they are how past writers figured out how to tell their stories, and other writers copied the method. Future writers benefit from aping those techniques, but are entirely free to figure out new methods and their own tricks to use in their storytelling. If they are effective, then writers will ape their techniques.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55115", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/48340/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 55146, "author": "Polygnome", "author_id": 19713, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/19713", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>_{(My background is that as a software engineer, I have read and written many such notices).}</p>\n<p><strong>Data File or Download</strong></p>\n<p>All caps is used in many licenses for emphasis, for example in the GPL, MIT License and BSD family of licenses (and probably many, many more, but those are the ones that come to mind, and I have checked them).</p>\n<p>Licenses are often written in nothing but ASCII, limiting the typographical choices for emphasis severely. Other options would include <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_(typography)#Letter-spacing\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">letter spacing (sperrsatz)</a>, but this is (nowadays) usually reserved for headings.</p>\n<p>I would find the notice as given entirely appropriate. You might even consider setting the <em>whole</em> notice in all caps.</p>\n<p>You also regularly see phrases like &quot;ALL RIGHTS RESERVED&quot; in all caps.</p>\n<p>Remember that in ASCII, typography is even more limited than with a typewriter. You can not double stroke to create boldface, you can not underline by moving the carriage back and re-typing on the same line with underscores. You don't have italics. Spacing and all caps are pretty much the only options for emphasis, but spacing often does not look that good. Compare:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<pre><code>The data in this table is confidential and should only be used in the \nscope of this collaboration. DO NOT SHARE!\n</code></pre>\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<pre><code>The data in this table is confidential and should only be used in the \nscope of this collaboration. D O N O T S H A R E !\n</code></pre>\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<pre><code>The data in this table is confidential and should only be used in the \nscope of this collaboration. D o n o t s h a r e !\n</code></pre>\n</blockquote>\n<p>The last two are unnecessarily hard to parse, <em>especially</em> when viewing the document in a reader that ignores consecutive whitespace like a browser (note that I <em>had</em> to set the text as code block to get verbatim monospace formatting).</p>\n<p>When using Unicode, one might opt to use narrower spaces. Note that in the font used here, whitespace, thin space and hair space have the same length (I tried using narrower spaces), and are much harder to type. Also, hair spaces are not supported by all browsers or other readers/text editors. For compatibility reasons, it is best to only use the normal whitespace.</p>\n<p>So yeah, given the limited options for emphasis in such notes and given that all caps is the accepted form for emphasis in many open source licenses, I do not see a reason not to use all caps for emphasis.</p>\n<p><strong>User Interface</strong> / <strong>Rich Text Documents</strong></p>\n<p>However, if the interface you are displaying in supports other forms of emphasis, like boldface, these are very worth exploring. Especially bold can draw the eye of the reader <em>immediately</em> to the &quot;do not share&quot; phrase, even better than all caps.</p>\n<p>Compare:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The data in this table is confidential and should only be used in the\nscope of this collaboration. DO NOT SHARE!</p>\n</blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The data in this table is confidential and should only be used in the\nscope of this collaboration. <strong>Do not share!</strong></p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Emphasizing legal notes like &quot;do not share&quot; in business documents is standard practice and not something to worry about. I wouldn't even think twice about it if I read such a notice. In fact, I'd probably find it odd if it was not emphasized, because that runs the risk of me inadvertently not seeing the notice.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 55154, "author": "occipita", "author_id": 44416, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/44416", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>In some jurisdictions there are specific requirements about particular things being all caps in legal documents, e.g. I am led to believe that in the US (or some states, I'm not sure which) an exclusion of liability in an end user contract must be in all caps; the style is also use to draw attention to terms that are given specific definitions elsewhere in the document. This is probably why you have seen this before, and has little or nothing to do with emphasis, but rather drawing attention to something unusual or unexpected. This doesn't seem to be the case in your text, so I would suggest not using them here.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55145", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/35998/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 55227, "author": "Sunnyjohn", "author_id": 48682, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/48682", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>It depends on how formal the letter is. It is often the case that the correspondent states their company name and their title at the top of the page as part of the heading. In this case, you are correct in supposing that pronouns would be used. For example:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Dear Mr/Ms ___,</p>\n<p>We write to inform you that a building inspection will take place at your address on 5th April 2021.\nOur representative will call at approximately midday and will telephone you beforehand in order to provide you with the exact time of his call.</p>\n<p>We hope this does not inconvenience you and please contact us if you have any difficulty with this arrangement.</p>\n<p>Yours, ___</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>So, yes, in this case, pronouns throughout.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 58770, "author": "Kate Gregory", "author_id": 15601, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/15601", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If the purpose of the letter is to introduce yourself (as a job applicant, as the new owner of something this person uses like a gym or an apartment building, as a local political candidate) then you should include your name in the body.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>My name is Somebody Something and I believe I would be an excellent ...</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>If the letter serves any other purpose, and the recipient either knows who you are or doesn't care (eg notifying tenants of a fire drill) then I/we in the body is just fine, no matter how formal the letter.</p>\n<p>I would not use &quot;party of the first part&quot; anywhere other than a contract or a letter that serves as an amendment to one (eg a letter confirming that the condition in a conditional offer has been met) -- these are generally heavily templated so I would just follow the template.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 59050, "author": "David Siegel", "author_id": 37041, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/37041", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A formal business letter should always be signed at the bottom by the writer, and the name (and possibly title) should be typed or printed below the signature. This is true even if the name is stated in the body of the letter. The address, but not the name, of the sender are usually given in the heading.</p>\n<p>A personal but formal letter should be signed with one's full name, but printing the name below the signature is less common. However it should be done if there is any reasonable chance that the recipient will be confused on who is sending the letter.</p>\n<p>If the sender is unknown to the recipient, and particularly when the sender wants an organization to check the proper file it is often wise to start with a name. For example</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Commissioner Jones:</p>\n<p>My name is Jane Doe. My Contract number is 2124789. I want to bring to your attention ...</p>\n<p>...</p>\n<pre><code>Jane Doe\n</code></pre>\n</blockquote>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55220", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/48653/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 55362, "author": "veryverde", "author_id": 47814, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/47814", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>That many 'O's and exclamation marks is probably excessive, because it will spill over the line break. Beyond that, you're good to go.</p>\n<p>Remember that a script should tell actors what they need to say, rather than <em>how</em> they should say it. How long the &quot;NOOOOOOOO&quot; is, is a decision for the actor, director, and editor, so I wouldn't worry too much about there only being 5 'O's over 12. 2-3 exclamation marks should be enough as well.</p>\n<p>Another option is to use annotations in the shape of <a href=\"https://writebetterscripts.com/parenthetical-script/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">parenthetical-script</a>:</p>\n<pre><code> CHARACTER \n (trailing off)\nNoooo....! \n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 55442, "author": "occipita", "author_id": 44416, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/44416", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Like this:</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0f6E.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><img src=\"https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0f6E.jpg\" alt=\"Empire Strikes Back original shooting script\" /></a>\n(Note that the &quot;I am your father&quot; line is in insert B - it wasn't revealed until the day of shooting - but the response is included here).</p>\n<p>In this case, all of the interpretation of the line is left up to the actor and director.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55360", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/49293/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 55420, "author": "Juhasz", "author_id": 42164, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/42164", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>Your first suggestion looks fine. It doesn't seem likely to be misconstrued. There are other similar sentences that would convey the same information in slightly different words, such as:</p>\n<p>This tag is assigned if <em>FieldName</em> is <em>Value</em></p>\n<p>This tag is assigned when field <em>FieldName</em> is <em>Value</em></p>\n<p>This tag is assigned if field: <em>FieldName</em> is <em>Value</em></p>\n<p>This tag is assigned if field <em>FieldName</em> equals <em>Value</em></p>\n<p>To me, none of these seems any better than the others.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>The important thing is that you <strong>should not</strong> use <em>contains</em> in place of <em>is</em> or <em>equals</em>.</p>\n<p><em>Contains</em> suggests this SQL query, which is likely to have very different results:</p>\n<pre><code>SELECT * FROM locations WHERE city LIKE '%chicago%'\n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 55422, "author": "JonStonecash", "author_id": 23701, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/23701", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I would argue against the use of &quot;is&quot; to describe the relationship. There are too many usages of &quot;is&quot; to allow it to be interpreted with the precision that technical writing must have.</p>\n<p>This is overly fussy, but after decades of trying to communicate technical details to non-technical audiences, I feel totally justified.</p>\n<p>For an exact match, I would write: the value stored in &quot;fieldName&quot; equals exactly the string 'appropriateConstant'. I do not guarantee that no one will misinterpreted this but there is a limit to how much dumbing-down is allowed.</p>\n<p>For a beginning substring match, I would write: the value stored in &quot;fieldName&quot; begins with or is exactly equal to the string 'appropriateConstant'.</p>\n<p>For a any-place-in-the-string substring match, I would write: the value stored in &quot;fieldName&quot; contains somewhere in its body or is exactly equal to the string 'appropriateConstant'.</p>\n<p>Because this is very wordy and you might have to repeat this many times, you might want to create shorthand notations such as EQ(&quot;fieldName&quot;,'appropriateConstant') or BEGINS(&quot;fieldName&quot;,'appropriateConstant').</p>\n<p>There is a variation of Murphy's Law used by the Air Force: if it is possible to install a part the wrong way, someone, somewhere, is making that mistake right now. The variation of that law that applies here is that if it is possible to misinterpret the meaning, then someone, somewhere, will certainly do just that.</p>\n<p>You have been warned.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55419", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/39969/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 56012, "author": "06Blakeyboy", "author_id": 49985, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/49985", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Honestly, I'm not sure if it's OK for an essay. But creativity it sounds great. You can tell how your character feels.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 56013, "author": "DWKraus", "author_id": 46563, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/46563", "pm_score": 2, "selected": true, "text": "<h2>Over-cute, a Little pretentious, but Unique enough to potentially work:</h2>\n<p>I can totally see someone thinking this is too clever, and it's definitely an obnoxiously cute idea. It's not proper English and for a class, that may mean it will be poorly graded. BUT it is fairly unique, and in the world of writing today, unique at least stands out. If your audience appreciates character and personal expression, and is willing to overlook just how clever it's being, it will make your work stand out.</p>\n<p>So really, it's entirely about your audience. If it's for a class, ASK the professor if they appreciate experimental techniques. If they do, you're set. If they tell you you're deviating from the formula and will be graded accordingly, then there's your answer.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/56010", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/49990/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 56547, "author": "Mary", "author_id": 44281, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/44281", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>You may want to look at some fix-up novels. These are works built up of smaller pieces of fiction that were often published separately first. Two such works are <em>A Canticle for Leibowitz</em> by Walter M. Miller Jr. and <em>Operation Chaos</em> by Poul Anderson. These give you an idea how such smaller stories can fit into a larger one.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 56548, "author": "JRE", "author_id": 40124, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/40124", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Any decent novel is going to have multiple plot lines, each containing most of the elements of plot that you listed. Not all characters or figures in a story are working towards the same goals - and often enough, even when they do have the same goals they have different routes to reaching them.</p>\n<p>Take a (relatively) new novel - <a href=\"https://www.baen.com/the-far-side-of-the-stars.html\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><em>The Far Side of the Stars</em> by David Drake.</a></p>\n<p>There are two main groups of characters in the story. One group is the crew of the starship <em>Princess Cecile</em> under the command of Captain Daniel Leary. The other (small) group is composed of a rich nobel and his wife. Those two have purchased the <em>Princess Cecile</em> from the Navy of Leary's world. He was the ship's commander while it belonged to the Navy. The rich folks hired him as captain for their travels to far away planets.</p>\n<p>The rich folks are (on the surface) traveling just for the fun of it. See far off exotic places, visit planets that are barely settled, hunt strange animals, etc. Behind their plans, however, is the search for a lost artefact from their home planet - a head sized diamond carved with a map of the Earth.</p>\n<p>Leary's goal is, obviously, to see the shipowners safely through their travels. Part of his motivation is, however, a desire to stay with his ship and to keep the best crew the Navy ever had together.</p>\n<p>The communications officer of his crew (Adele Mundy) is (besides her normal duties) a spy working for her and Leary's government, with a mission to gather intelligence about enemy expansion into the regions the rich folks want to visit.</p>\n<p>Adele also has an interest in visiting a particular world along the planned route because one of her few surviving relatives lives there.</p>\n<p>All have different motivations and goals. Some goals belong to all of the groups, some goals are personal, and some goals belong to one of the sub-groups.</p>\n<p>Reaching those individual goals leads to multiple overlapping and interacting plot lines, with each plot line containing nearly all of your plot characteristics.</p>\n<p>Even reaching individual smaller goals contain all the elements of a plot line.</p>\n<p>At one point, they land on a particular planet to hunt &quot;dragons&quot; - flying snake-like things that live in naturally occurring (or are they artifical and made by a long vanished intelligent race?) crystal pyramids.</p>\n<p>The landing, the preparations, the hunt, the narrow escape from an attacking dragon, and the hurried lift off afterwards contain all the elements of a full plot line - but only fill a single twenty page chapter.</p>\n<p>The novel actually ends with the rich folks reaching their main goal (recovering the Earth diamond,) and Leary, Adele, and the crew taking on and achieving a new goal made necessary by the results of Adele's research. Meeting the new challenge is also only possible because of the things learned and encountered while working towards the previous goals.</p>\n<p>Alternatively, you might consider something like <a href=\"http://www.bertramchandler.com/novels/thehardwayup.aspx\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\"><em>The Hard Way Up</em> by A. Bertram Chandler.</a> It is rather like the &quot;fix up&quot; novels mentioned by Mary. The novel tells part of the story of how John Grimes went from officer of the space navy of the Earth to being the Admiral of the Fleet for a bunch of rebellious planets far from Earth and the other settled planets. Each story was published individually, then they were collected to form the book.</p>\n<p>Grimes is a competent officer who generally does his best to do things right - but has the misfortune to encounter problems that can't be solved in any right way. The over-arching target of all the stories is that he's going to be run out of the service eventually, and that it won't be for anything he personally screwed up.</p>\n<p>The stories are separate, but some do make occassional references to events in earlier stories.</p>\n<p>That novel works because it isn't a continuous flow of &quot;whack-a-mole&quot; with Grimes being smacked with the next problem while still recovering from the previous one. There's always an implied pause of weeks or months between adventures.</p>\n<p>As you may be able to tell, I have read both of those books and enjoyed them immensely. In addition to the good plots, they also have things to say about people and history and politics.</p>\n<hr />\n<p>In summary, a good novel may contain multiple smaller plots that contribute to the larger plot and theme of the novel.</p>\n<p>A bad novel will simply have random events involving the same characters because the author doesn't know where the story is going. A good author constructs the individual pieces to form a whole.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 56550, "author": "Lalli", "author_id": 51534, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/51534", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>If you're writing a novel, you even need to use multiple storylines. Most often, there is a love line in novels, and you can also tell more about the minor characters. Usually such novels combine detective story, mysticism, history and high prose.</p>\n<p>There is something similar in the book &quot;Panserhjerte&quot; by U Nesbø and &quot;The Passenger&quot; by Jean-Christophe Granger. Try to read them, maybe they will inspire you and answer some questions.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/56546", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/49648/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 58727, "author": "Erk", "author_id": 10826, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/10826", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>With the reservation from the comments above that this isn't a good way to analyze the cohesiveness or conciseness of a text and that it will likely rather waste your time, you could use a text classification technique for preparing a word set for building a decision tree.</p>\n<p>I don't know what this is called though.</p>\n<p>We did this in an AI lab at UNI where we were tasked with classifying articles into one of two sets. (Someone defined them as &quot;coal&quot; and &quot;cauliflower.&quot;)</p>\n<p>You start by filtering out stopwords as you mention.</p>\n<p>Then for each of the remaining words, you count how many documents it exists in. Let's call this value <code>N1</code> for the number of documents containing the word in set 1 and <code>N2</code> for the number of documents containing the word in set 2.</p>\n<p>Finally, you determine the value of the word as:</p>\n<pre><code>ABS(N1 - N2)\n</code></pre>\n<p>This means that if the word exists in many documents in both sets, the number gets low. If it exists a lot in one set but not in the other the number gets high. If it doesn't exist a lot in either set the number gets low.</p>\n<p>The number of documents in each set must be the same, or you should transform <code>N1</code> and <code>N2</code> into percentages of documents having the word in each set (i.e. divide <code>N1</code> with the total number of documents in set 1, etc).</p>\n<p>When we compared the lists of words for each set we found &quot;coal&quot; was highly ranked in one set and &quot;cauliflower&quot; was highly ranked in the other. (And we took this list of words that was a good representation of the difference between the document sets and created a decision tree, but that's beside this discussion.)</p>\n<p>I'm not sure how to do this for more than two sets of documents though, but the essence of the process would be to find words used a lot in one set and used much less in all the others.</p>\n<p>Perhaps, for each set and each word do:</p>\n<pre><code>MAX(0, ABS(Nthis - N1 - N2 ... -Nx))\n</code></pre>\n<p>Where <code>Nthis</code> is the number of documents having the word in the current set. And <code>N1 - N2 - ... - Nx</code> is the number in the other documents. (Or percentages if the document sets are of different sizes.)</p>\n<p>Or create an accumulative word score by calculating the score for the word in the current document set against all other document sets one at a time summing the word score.</p>\n<p>You need to fire up your IDE and test approaches.</p>\n<p><strong>Update: Pseudo code</strong></p>\n<p>Not sure this helps but I couldn't stop myself... This would be how to calculate a word score for more than two sets... maybe...:</p>\n<pre><code>words // all words in all document sets minus stop words\nwordScore // score of words\ndocSetWords // a list of doc sets that is a list of words in that doc set\n // i.e. docSetWords[0][0] = first word in first set (pseudowise...)\n\nforeach word in words\n for i = 0 to docSetWords.length - 1\n for j = i + 1 to docSetWords.length\n N1 = count word in docSetWords[i]\n N2 = count word in docSetWords[j]\n wordScore[word] = wordScore[word] + ABS(N1 - N2)\n // I.e. sum of word scores\n end\n end\nend\n</code></pre>\n" }, { "answer_id": 58731, "author": "Jochem Schulenklopper", "author_id": 51675, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/51675", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>From <a href=\"https://medium.com/nanonets/topic-modeling-with-lsa-psla-lda-and-lda2vec-555ff65b0b05\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://medium.com/nanonets/topic-modeling-with-lsa-psla-lda-and-lda2vec-555ff65b0b05</a>, &quot;topic modeling&quot; might be the term, and &quot;LSA&quot; and &quot;LDA&quot; are useful techniques for that.</p>\n<p>From that article (emphasis mine):</p>\n<p>&quot;In natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, there is a hierarchy of lenses through which we can extract meaning — from words to sentences to paragraphs to documents. At the document level, <em>one of the most useful ways to understand text is by analyzing its topics</em>. The process of learning, recognizing, and extracting these topics across a collection of documents is called <strong>topic modeling</strong>.</p>\n<p>All topic models are based on the same basic assumption:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>each document consists of a mixture of topics, and</li>\n<li>each topic consists of a collection of words.\nIn other words, topic models are built around the idea that the semantics of our document are actually being governed by some hidden, or “latent,” variables that we are not observing. As a result, <em>the goal of topic modeling is to uncover these latent variables</em> — topics — that shape the meaning of our document and corpus.&quot;</li>\n</ul>\n<p>&quot;<strong>Latent Semantic Analysis</strong>, or LSA, is one of the foundational techniques in topic modeling. The core idea is to take a matrix of what we have — documents and terms — and decompose it into a separate document-topic matrix and a topic-term matrix.&quot;</p>\n<p>&quot;LDA stands for <strong>Latent Dirichlet Allocation</strong>. [...] With LDA, we can extract human-interpretable topics from a document corpus, where each topic is characterized by the words they are most strongly associated with.&quot;</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/58683", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/51675/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 59707, "author": "veryverde", "author_id": 47814, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/47814", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>When writing in general, you can omit words by punctuation:</p>\n<pre><code>When I went outside my home I had a feeling: something wasn't right. I\nguess I didn't have the time... that is how I almost died.\n</code></pre>\n<p>From an &quot;acceptability&quot; &amp; literary point of view, this is perfectly fine, because it gives you a (more) unique voice. Given that it's a song you're writing, it's really not a problem, unless this is not the type of voice you want to project.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 59708, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 2, "selected": true, "text": "<p>I would just change to periods, especially for eliminating &quot;and&quot;. It almost always works fine. It works in all your conjunctive cases:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When I went outside my home I had a feeling.</p>\n<p>Something wasn't right.</p>\n<p>I guess I didn't have the time.</p>\n<p>That is how I almost died.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>It might be a bad <em>habit</em>. It is not a bad practice. Don't do it if the meaning is damaged.</p>\n<p>If the word is not necessary to the meaning, then brevity beats wordiness.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/59706", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/52814/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 60889, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 3, "selected": false, "text": "<p>No, your song represents an emotion; longing. Many songs do that.</p>\n<p>A story, at its minimum, is a sequence of causes and effects, typically leading the listener to wonder what happens -- and then get the answer.</p>\n<p>It does not require an antagonist, really, or human conflict.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In a little while from now</p>\n<p>If I'm not feeling any less sour</p>\n<p>I promise myself to treat myself</p>\n<p>And visit a nearby tower</p>\n<p>And climbing to the top</p>\n<p>Will throw myself off</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Gilbert O'Sullivan: You have a story in the first lines: The singer has made a conditional promise: If they don't feel better soon, he will &quot;treat himself&quot;.</p>\n<p>The listener is engaged and wondering what will happen. This is a story.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>… &quot;Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together</p>\n<p>I've got some real estate here in my bag&quot;</p>\n<p>So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies</p>\n<p>And walked off to look for America</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Paul Simon: Bingo, a story in the first line: A proposition is made, &quot;Let us be lovers and marry our fortunes together&quot;.</p>\n<p>Will it happen? Yes, we get the answer in a few lines, but then WHAT will happen? The song is the story of a desperate search for a place to belong. (IMO).</p>\n<p>Many songs are just about a momentary feeling, love, or sorrow, getting fed up and breaking up, struggle, etc. You could call these &quot;declarations&quot;. I feel strong. I feel victorious. I feel angry. I feel healed. I feel saved.</p>\n<p>Story songs are often also about a theme feeling, but told as a sequence over time. &quot;A&quot; happened, so &quot;B&quot; happened, so &quot;C&quot; happened.</p>\n<p>In the song &quot;Alone Again&quot;, the song theme is loneliness, but told in a sequence: We begin at the end: He is stood up at the altar and this is the last straw, he is suicidal. Then we flash back, to all the times he has lost people and felt alone, time and again.</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>… I learned the truth at seventeen</p>\n<p>That love was meant for beauty queens</p>\n<p>And high school girls with clear skinned smiles</p>\n<p>Who married young and then retired</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>Janis Ian. Again: Story from the first line: **What is the truth?!?!&quot;</p>\n<p>None of these songs require interaction with others; Paul Simon's has a lover but they are not in conflict, they are fellow searchers taking comfort in each other.</p>\n<p>All the songs have an emotional theme, we recognize it whether we can name it or not.</p>\n<p>The difference in story songs is they relate events that brought on this emotion. Why is Gilbert O'Sullivan feeling suicidal?</p>\n<p>Why is Paul Simon feeling lost and melancholy?</p>\n<p>Why is Janis Ian feeling unloved, ugly, left out?</p>\n<p>For your &quot;Old West&quot; song to be a story, the emotional THEME would be you want the Old West back, the STORY would be WHY you want the Old West back.</p>\n<p>What happened to you?</p>\n<p>Or what is happening to you?</p>\n<p>You have 2 or 3 verses and a chorus, what are the 2 or 3 life problems that would be solved if you were back in the Old West?</p>\n<p>What was allowed or prevailed then that you wish was allowed or prevailed now?</p>\n<p>Duels? A simpler life? Riding the open range and living under the stars? Fresh air? True love?</p>\n<p>Pick your theme, the feeling you want to convey. Then your story (in poetic verses) is the 2 or 3 most important incidents that have made you feel that way.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62800, "author": "cookiejar", "author_id": 55944, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/55944", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Essentially, a story tells how somebody solved some problem. Your song expresses a desire, but does not present a problem. No problem, no resolution.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62802, "author": "David Siegel", "author_id": 37041, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/37041", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A &quot;story&quot; often has a plot, problem, conflict, and resolution. But not always. There is a famous example of a story (sometimes attributed to Hemingway) in just six words:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>For sale, baby shoes, never worn.</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>No problem solved, no resolution.</p>\n<p>I would tend to think of the above text as a verse, rather than a story, but the two terms are not exclusive. Other evocative verses might be called stories, for example <a href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">&quot;The Lake isle of Innisfree&quot;</a> (whch begins &quot;I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree&quot;).</p>\n<p>Of course some works in verse are stories, or even novels. (<em>Beowulf</em> comes to mind).</p>\n<p>In any case there is no generally accepted definition of a &quot;story&quot;. One could call this a story if one pleased.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/60888", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/52814/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 60928, "author": "Amadeus", "author_id": 26047, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/26047", "pm_score": 2, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Typically for billboards or banners you want to keep your word count at 6 or less. Or syllables under 8. That is what typical people can read in a glance.</p>\n<p>You have 10. Some alternatives:</p>\n<p>[a bit long] Get your dream out of the drawer!</p>\n<p>Time to work on your dream?</p>\n<p>Let's pursue your dream.</p>\n<p>And so on. As a drive-by thing (either literally or metaphorically for a page flipper in a magazine), your line is a bit too long, people will get &quot;Time to get your dream out of...&quot; and move on.</p>\n<p>I've written a lot of ad copy; my professional advice is to shorten it.</p>\n<p>Perhaps &quot;mothballs&quot; is better than &quot;the drawer&quot;.</p>\n<p>Perhaps &quot;revive&quot; is a useful word; e.g. &quot;Revive that old dream&quot;.</p>\n<p>6 words or 8 syllables is not an ironclad rule, it is just where the statistics point. Longer headlines have worked. But I play the odds, if I can get the thought across in fewer words, I do.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 60933, "author": "NofP", "author_id": 28528, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/28528", "pm_score": 2, "selected": true, "text": "<h2>Not like that</h2>\n<p>Your suggestion suffers from (at least) the following flaws:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>too long</li>\n<li>unfocused</li>\n</ul>\n<p>To improve you need to focus on the thought you want to elicit in the reader.</p>\n<p>Some examples below.</p>\n<h3>Be assertive</h3>\n<p>Note: a question in a banner typically takes more time to process. The reason is that the reader has to use their brain to find an answer unless the answer is obvious.</p>\n<p>Asking whether it is a good time to pursue something, the reader has to consider the alternatives, evaluate whether they are more important/urgent than the dream, and decide whether the risk of wasting time on a dream is worth it. All this takes time, and by then they have already passed a few other banners.</p>\n<h3>Example 1:</h3>\n<p>A simpler banner like:</p>\n<pre><code>Got a dream?\n</code></pre>\n<p>Makes the reader think about the dream, about the fact that they have not pursued, and consider whether it is time to do so.</p>\n<h3>Example 2:</h3>\n<p>If you want them to feel the urgency, then add a reference to it:</p>\n<pre><code>Time up for your dream!\n</code></pre>\n<h3>Example 3:</h3>\n<p>If instead this is just a ploy to advertise watches then focus on the time element and push the dream out of the picture:</p>\n<pre><code>Now is the time.\n</code></pre>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/60927", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/54090/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 62700, "author": "levininja", "author_id": 30918, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30918", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>This is based solely on my opinion/experience but, I am pretty sure I have seen that done before, and it has not bothered me. I think it is probably acceptable.</p>\n<p>I also think I more often see this case handled as ellipses followed by a question mark.</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even...?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>But I wouldn't spend much time worrying about it either way. That's the kind of thing that, if you're going the traditional publishing route, your future editor would have an opinion on. Or if you're going the self-publishing route, that decision is the kind of detail that readers (in my own completely subjective opinion) don't care about. I've read so many thousands of books and what bothers me is things that are obviously grammatical/spelling errors (of which I usually notice plenty even in the more well-written books), not so much the things like this.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62811, "author": "cookiejar", "author_id": 55944, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/55944", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A dash is a break in thought, from one focus to another.</p>\n<pre><code>I have to warn them—no, no what am I doing?\n</code></pre>\n<p>An ellipses indicates omission, which is what I think you are looking for. At the risk of being pedantic, an ellipsis is a single symbol, not three dots. Technically the question mark is a full stop and, like an exclamation point, has its own &quot;dot.&quot;</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even …?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>is not</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even . . .?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>I am referencing the AP Stylebook 2020-2022 (55th edition). In the era of typewriters, three dots (periods) were typed for an ellipsis. With the advent of word processing, this led to layout problems and some people tried to 'connect the dots' with non-breaking spaces. A non-breaking space is, itself, a symbol. So is the ellipsis (<a href=\"https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/punctuation/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/punctuation/</a>) On most keyboards the ellipsis is formed by pressing Option and Semicolon keys together. An ellipsis also takes a preceding space. So much for form. The purpose of the symbol is to indicate content left out (e.g., deleted or not complete).</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/62686", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/51709/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 62700, "author": "levininja", "author_id": 30918, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/30918", "pm_score": 3, "selected": true, "text": "<p>This is based solely on my opinion/experience but, I am pretty sure I have seen that done before, and it has not bothered me. I think it is probably acceptable.</p>\n<p>I also think I more often see this case handled as ellipses followed by a question mark.</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even...?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>But I wouldn't spend much time worrying about it either way. That's the kind of thing that, if you're going the traditional publishing route, your future editor would have an opinion on. Or if you're going the self-publishing route, that decision is the kind of detail that readers (in my own completely subjective opinion) don't care about. I've read so many thousands of books and what bothers me is things that are obviously grammatical/spelling errors (of which I usually notice plenty even in the more well-written books), not so much the things like this.</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 62811, "author": "cookiejar", "author_id": 55944, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/55944", "pm_score": -1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>A dash is a break in thought, from one focus to another.</p>\n<pre><code>I have to warn them—no, no what am I doing?\n</code></pre>\n<p>An ellipses indicates omission, which is what I think you are looking for. At the risk of being pedantic, an ellipsis is a single symbol, not three dots. Technically the question mark is a full stop and, like an exclamation point, has its own &quot;dot.&quot;</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even …?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>is not</p>\n<pre><code>“But do you think the island even . . .?”\n</code></pre>\n<p>I am referencing the AP Stylebook 2020-2022 (55th edition). In the era of typewriters, three dots (periods) were typed for an ellipsis. With the advent of word processing, this led to layout problems and some people tried to 'connect the dots' with non-breaking spaces. A non-breaking space is, itself, a symbol. So is the ellipsis (<a href=\"https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/punctuation/\" rel=\"nofollow noreferrer\">https://www.toptal.com/designers/htmlarrows/punctuation/</a>) On most keyboards the ellipsis is formed by pressing Option and Semicolon keys together. An ellipsis also takes a preceding space. So much for form. The purpose of the symbol is to indicate content left out (e.g., deleted or not complete).</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/62688", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/55856/" ]

[ { "answer_id": 63098, "author": "Slatuvel", "author_id": 56006, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/56006", "pm_score": 0, "selected": false, "text": "<p>Perhaps you can check out Obsidian, it's a very useful HTML based program, completely free and customizable. It has a pretty large user base and forum where people share their tips and tricks!</p>\n" }, { "answer_id": 63244, "author": "kaybaird", "author_id": 56426, "author_profile": "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/56426", "pm_score": 1, "selected": false, "text": "<p>I believe Scrivener will do this. I'm just learning Scrivener and can't provide directions, but I have seen this format in one kind of output it has made of my work, when it does its &quot;compile.&quot; The working outline, called the Binder, shows organization graphically, and provides all the features you listed. But for the numerical labelling, you use the compiler.</p>\n" } ]

[ "https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/63093", "https://writers.stackexchange.com", "https://writers.stackexchange.com/users/56221/" ]