Charles Stewart

883 reputation

213

bio	website	textproof.com/stewart
	location	Berlin, Germany
	age	43
visits	member for	2 years, 5 months
	seen	May 6 at 9:39
stats	profile views	22

Freelance scientific copy-editor.

You can read my irregular waffles at advogato.org/person/chalst/.

	883 reputation	bio	website	textproof.com/stewart	visits	member for	2 years, 5 months
213 badges		location	Berlin, Germany		seen	May 6 at 9:39

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49 Comments

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May 6	comment	What is the proper format/style for using and properly citing code in an APA paper? I give an example at writers.stackexchange.com/questions/980/… - the full answer really involves getting a copy of the APA style guide.
Jan 10	comment	I'm getting tired of “he said” “she said” in dialogue; how do I get around it? '"show don't tell" Nazis' - Plenty of showing in your text, and it's just distracting filler. Usually in dialog, dialog is what's interesting and engaging to the reader, and you should only interrupt it with something significant. Oh, and Godwin's law, you pox-ridden, crystal-hugging hippie.
Aug 31	comment	What's the proper etiquette/format for updating a blog post? I've used "Postscript (date)" in this manner for the last ten or so years.
Aug 31	comment	Breaking Into Technical Writing - Where to Start (from a programming background) I don't like the ACM, and I let my membership lapse as soon as I no longer needed to attend the large ACM conferences. The IEEE is a bit better. I like the look of the STC, although not being a tech writer, so far I only subscribe to their blog, Intercom.
Aug 31	comment	What is the proper way to write a date containing two days in a row? This is often called a date range.
Aug 31	comment	What is the proper way to write a date containing two days in a row? It is especially true when writing slide titles (as opposed to, say, prose) that cutting the number of glyphs can substantially increase a slide's effectiveness. While I think the use of the em dash is good in this particular case, I think the general suggestion to avoid ampersands in slide titles is bad - impossible though it is for me to believe this of the impeccable Lauren. For some reason, many publishers seem reluctant to use ampersands in the titles on book spines, even when it solves obvious typesetting issues.
Aug 31	comment	Does a technical writer need a technical background? For business writing types who thought that Monica talking about enterprises with around 100 employees, SME is tech writer jargon for subject matter expert.
Aug 31	comment	What style suggestions are common for which words are used in hyperlinks? Linking to just "claims" is awful UI: you should usually strain to make the link have at least two words. I agree with the longer phrase: here's a link text usefulness test: if you turned the HTML page into just a list of the link texts, how informative would these be? I find "claims that pigs can fly" to be substantially more informative about what you will find when you click the link, enough to justify the increased risk of the link being split over lines.
Apr 29	comment	Avoiding foot&note disease I'm familiar with these under the name marginal notes. It's a good point - the textual excursion is smaller with them - but they make for more complex page layout.
Apr 29	comment	Avoiding foot&note disease Painful for whom? The writer or the reader? I certainly see that the footnote is easiest for the writer in your example, but wouldn't the discussion of the incursions be impoverished for a reader who had not made the excursion to the footnote about the Templars? It looks like a case where the writer really should make the text linear.
Apr 22	comment	Writing a bibliography Comprehensive style guides do treat the case of the unknown author. For instance, Chicago's author-title style asks for title only to be used when citing, and for "Anonymous" to be used in place of the author's name in the reflist.
Apr 22	comment	Writing a bibliography Do note that this author-title format for the reflist is just one of two approaches used by Chicago; the style also supports author-date.
Apr 22	comment	What needs to be included in a corporate style guide? Great answer. Two points: (i) not all CSGs are so focussed on design aspects - to take a CSG from my experience, the KPMG style guide had more instructions concerning their idiosyncratic punctuation and less to do with visual layout; (ii) even with your CSG, I think the intersection with "editorial" is bigger than the intersection with "design".
Apr 19	comment	Writing first programming book 500-750 words per page? That's dense text! I would change the size of text to get a more user-friendly 250-300 words per page. It will give you more of a sense of progress, and be kinder on the eye when you want to review your work.
Apr 13	comment	I'm an editor who generally uses Word to communicate changes with my authors. Is Adobe's InCopy better for this task? Oh, I remember asking this question! I had meant to dig out some of the old proposal questions myself, +1.
Apr 12	comment	What are the most common style manuals? I'd say a readership is an audience, but I guess this starts to be hairsplitting.
Apr 12	comment	What are the most common style manuals? Not so much audience as publication venue. Authors sometimes choose to follow a particular style guide, but more often if a style guide is followed, it is because their publisher insisted on it.
Apr 7	comment	When should I use punctuation with bullets? The virtue of this style is that it is a possible approach to punctuating the list inline inside a single sentence (e.g., "For example: (a) Apples; (b) Oranges; (c) Pears.") But note that this is a minority approach. Chicago is the most important scholarly style guide.
Apr 7	comment	How credible is wikipedia? There's an assumption here that Encyclopedia Britannica is regarded as reference quality in scientific research. In fact, tertiary sources such as encyclopedias are rarely cited in research, and are treated with a certain degree of suspicion.
Apr 6	comment	How credible is wikipedia? @alexy13 I hope [Google Scholar]'s better than wikipedia: It's about the same quality as Google Books, which is to say, lots of scanning errors, lots of problems with metadata (most annoyingly, the date attribute is frequently wrong, undermining the value of date-limited searches). Its great virtue is that there is no comparable discipline-independent paper search since Microsoft dropped their offering.