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Feeds
Feeds
1:42 PM
0
Q: Writers Communities?

One MonkeyI don't mean writer's circles, or "auditioning sites", although some of these have forums tacked on as a by the by. Usually places to talk about the beardy philosophy of writing are moribund places as many writers are just not joiners. Does anyone know of a healthy writer's community that talks ...

writing creative-writing community
 
 
9 hours later…
Feeds
Feeds
10:18 PM
0
Q: Writing 19th century upperclass English dialog

CasebashI was recently rereading bits of Pride and Prejudice and the dialog is absolutely brilliant. How can I learn to write dialog that sounds like it is from this general era? For example are there any lists of words that I should try to substitute or differences in the grammatical constructs used?

writing-style
 
mootinator
mootinator
11:16 PM
4
Q: Policy change: Writing critique questions now welcome

Jeff AtwoodWe had a long, long discussion about this internally, and we've decided that writing critique questions are officially on-topic. In retrospect, the idea that a site about writing doesn't allow talking about writing (except in the rather narrow context of objective question examples) was, uh, a b...

discussion faq critique
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
11:34 PM
I'm switching the feed to an overlay
 
mootinator
mootinator
Ok
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
the issue with feed-as-messages is it tends to overwhelm the room. The overlay is much .. friendlier
particularly on a low volume room
 
mootinator
mootinator
Fair enough :)
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
I also updated writers.stackexchange.com/faq to clarify that writing critiques are allowed
however, it must be your writing that already exists. The "let's write something new and then talk about it" doesn't really seem to work.
those types of questions tend to do poorly across the network. "I'm imagining a situation where.." versus "I have this problem.."
 
mootinator
mootinator
This is true. I had wondered if the platform might do "writing contests" well, but that's a future meta post to get downvoted to oblivion ;)
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
11:39 PM
this is a trend we've noticed in general
"imagine if..." is really shaky footing for a good question on our platform
we really want it to be a problem you are actually facing
if you have any other ideas for promoting writers, let us know. And as always share the link :)
 
mootinator
mootinator
Thanks.
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
Stack Overflow Blog: Announcer, Booster, and Publicist Badges
Jeff Atwood

We just rolled out three new badges to encourage sharing worthy questions:

Each badge can be earned only once, and each must be earned on a different question. Also, the tracked IPs must originate from outside our existing network.

So how do you share questions? I mentioned in an earlier post that we support a shorter URL form specifically for sharing:

http://diy.stackexchange.com/q/970/123

You can access the shorter URL form using the twitter and facebook sharing icons on public beta sites, or by right-clicking and copying the link conveniently provided under each question, on any site: …

We've been chatting a bit with Michael Lopp of randsinrepose.com about this site as well -- the critique policy change is partly based on his feedback
 
mootinator
mootinator
Well, I hope it works out. This site does seem to have a lot of potential, despite not having gotten anywhere quickly.
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
What was that quote? "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" The writers site is just dancing about architecture -- Joel Spolsky
the absurdity of a writing site where you can't talk about your writing really struck me when I was looking today
I think we got stuck on the logjam of objectivity, but we allow constructive subjectivity now..
I'll try to post a good critique question this week as well. You should as well, if you can.
 
mootinator
mootinator
I will give it a shot.
 
Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
11:47 PM
excellent -- see you on the site then!
 

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