We�ve talked to quite a few actors and they all hate the technical lines. Do you ever come across the actors and they give you some feedback on the stuff you make them learn?

One of my proudest moments was the first time I heard Patrick Stewart say something that I�d put in to his dialogue, which was the term 'microfusion initiator'. I suspect that someone who was trained in Shakespeare and who was a stage actor used to doing a different kind of role probably isn�t too pleased to do a lot of that dialogue.

Teri Farrell, who played Lieutenant Dax on Deep Space Nine gave me a very important insight the first time that I met her about technical dialogue in scripts. She said that she really had no problem speaking all of these technical lines if she was in a scene talking to the computer or just taking data from the screen of the computer. But if she was in a scene where she was interacting with two or three other characters, she had to remember all of these technical terms that meant absolutely nothing to her, interact with those characters and watch her eyeline, and play off of what that character was trying to play. When she had to keep all of those things going and try to speak this language that made no sense to her, that was really hard. And so I always was very conscientious about that. I tried to limit the amount of technical language in dialogue in the scenes that I knew were going to be tough scenes for the actors to do anyway.

When I first met Teri and shyly introduced myself and told her what I did on the show which is; 'I�m the guy who puts all of that terrible technical language into your dialogue', she sort of jokingly grabbed me by the lapels and lifted me off my feet and swore at me rather profusely. Then she chuckled and said that she was just teasing, but it was a somewhat intimidating moment there.