: Re: Maintaining the consistency of voice and spontaneity throughout a piece So straight to it, I don't write very long pieces. Usually poetry or flash fiction and a smattering of short stories

If you are revising to the point where you are altering tenses then you are not probably in a destructive cycle of endless rewrite which has no exit.

It is a total fallacy that writing that has been altered 100 times is always better than writing that has never been altered at all. Plenty of quite successful authors send off something close to a first draft and make money writing and are considered very good at it.

Perfect example is Heinlein's rules for writing:
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order.

Pretty good rule. You know why? If you are rewriting what are you NOT doing? You are NOT making something new. If you are rewriting you are NOT writing another story, another novel, whatever. What is better, to have a superlatively polished turd or to have 3 stories at least one of which has the potential to NOT be a turd at all?

If you are serious about writing you have to have the ego to put something down on paper, hand it to somebody else, and then go ahead and start working on another thing. If you are going to doubt yourself so much that you have to utterly and totally rewrite everything you do constantly, you'll never get anywhere. You will make vastly more progress by moving on than obsessing over something that isn't working.

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: Is active or passive voice more common in scientific writing? I am choosing between two sentences: We display the values of X in Table 1. The values of X are displayed in Table 1. The first

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: In contrast to some (or possibly all) of the other answers, I don't think it's to do with what particular traits the villian has so much as whether they embody a consistent set of ideals

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: In searchable documentation, what function does a glossary serve? I work (with a team) on a large documentation set for a complex software product. We publish HTML and have built-in search

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: Examples in documentation can include code, graphics with "fake" data, web sites, and more. Examples are usually tightly coupled with the documentation containing them but often need to be

: Re: Maintaining the consistency of voice and spontaneity throughout a piece So straight to it, I don't write very long pieces. Usually poetry or flash fiction and a smattering of short stories

More posts by @Hamaas631

: Is active or passive voice more common in scientific writing? I am choosing between two sentences: We display the values of X in Table 1. The values of X are displayed in Table 1. The first

: In contrast to some (or possibly all) of the other answers, I don't think it's to do with what particular traits the villian has so much as whether they embody a consistent set of ideals

: In searchable documentation, what function does a glossary serve? I work (with a team) on a large documentation set for a complex software product. We publish HTML and have built-in search

: Examples in documentation can include code, graphics with "fake" data, web sites, and more. Examples are usually tightly coupled with the documentation containing them but often need to be

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