: Re: How to handle foreign military ranks? Suppose you have a character who has a rank in a foreign military - say, Feldwebel Hans. That's the equivalent of a Sergeant. On one hand, having people

There are a couple of ways of handling this.

The obvious way is to have a wall of text at some point explaining the foreign military ranks. A variant is to have two (or more) characters discuss the ranks and how they map. You could take this in all different directions: your purpose is to inform the reader, but the characters could easily have other motivations for the discussion.

A third is for some characters to use a near equivalent, even though most of them use the foreign word. This is a cute little hook for enhancing characterisation, but you do have to think about how the subject would react to the -- to him -- alien designation. This could lead to a discussion of comparitive ranks, of course, but you could get away with a potential discussion that doesn't actually happen. Except, of course, you've told your reader just enough.

A fourth option is to not explain the equivalences at all. This works if you can clearly delineate throughout the novel what his duties and responsbilities are as well as how he interacts with those above and below him. This avoids the preconceptions of the English terms, but you have to work harder to describe the non-English structure.

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: Is it so bad to end up with a "done before" plot? I'm not delusional about the nature of the science fiction novel I'm (very) slowly working on. A brief run down might be as follows: Set

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: What linguistic tools do you use? I've got a Flip Dictionary, a Thesaurus, my trusty Strunk&White, and I use the almighty GOOG(le) should I ever be unsure of the definition of a word. What

@Martha805

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: Here is one (probably less traditional) approach, which covers the whole process: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/01/meta-principles-i-learned-from-running-lean/ The idea here is to couple audience discovery

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: What are some appropriate uses of readability tests? Do you use readability metrics (such as Gunning fog or Flesch-Kincaid) as you're working on a piece? If so, how do you use them, and what

: Re: How to handle foreign military ranks? Suppose you have a character who has a rank in a foreign military - say, Feldwebel Hans. That's the equivalent of a Sergeant. On one hand, having people

More posts by @Martha805

: Is it so bad to end up with a "done before" plot? I'm not delusional about the nature of the science fiction novel I'm (very) slowly working on. A brief run down might be as follows: Set

: What linguistic tools do you use? I've got a Flip Dictionary, a Thesaurus, my trusty Strunk&White, and I use the almighty GOOG(le) should I ever be unsure of the definition of a word. What

: Here is one (probably less traditional) approach, which covers the whole process: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/01/meta-principles-i-learned-from-running-lean/ The idea here is to couple audience discovery

: What are some appropriate uses of readability tests? Do you use readability metrics (such as Gunning fog or Flesch-Kincaid) as you're working on a piece? If so, how do you use them, and what

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