Under the heading of “don’t deceive your reader,” I want to file this piece of advice. When you’re telling your story, tell it directly, and don’t pretend it’s someone else’s. I see this a lot, and I don’t understand why authors do it. They launch into a tale about “someone” …
Category: Editing
Maintaining Truth in Narrative Nonfiction
A special challenge of narrative nonfiction is deciding how closely you want to stick to the truth. Do you want to be fully dedicated to it, come what may? Or do you want to soften some blows, change some names to protect the guilty? Maybe you feel a little creative …
Capitalizing Deity Pronouns
One more post on editing books for the Christian market, and this one’s a touchy subject. The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style calls for lowercase deity pronouns (that is, he and his when referring to God). This deeply offends some people, who see it as a sign of disrespect, despite …
Take Extra Care with Scripture Citations
Quoting Shakespeare is one thing. It’s easy enough to open a copy of Hamlet to get a citation right. Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.—William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. The Harvard Classics 1909–14. Act V, Scene …
Q&A: Quotations versus Dialogue
Q: I have literally hundreds of quotes in my autobiography, and after reading your post about them, I’m really confused. Most of what I’m writing about is not quoting a known source like Mark Twain. Rather, it’s in the form of he said, “blah, blah, blah” when I’m relating a …
Verify the Sources of Your Quotations
One of the most common problems I see in new writers’ nonfiction manuscripts is quotations that are either inaccurate, insufficiently sourced, or both. ☐You have in your notes, if not in the text, citations and links for your sources. Sites like BrainyQuote, Great-Quotes.com, and even Goodreads, which should know better, …
Avoid Ambiguity in Your Nonfiction
Today’s post applies mainly to academic, prescriptive, or expository writing. Narrative nonfiction, especially memoir, can leave room for ambiguity. But if your book is meant to instruct, it needs to be clear. The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not …
Present Your Facts in a Credible Way
Ideally you will have checked all your facts before you started writing. But when making a fact-checking editing pass, you can double-check. We leave this pass until after we’ve edited for voice, because in that pass we may have changed enough of the wording to require a second look at …
Ensure Your True-Life Anecdotes Are Really True
We finished the Voice section of the Elements of Nonfiction Editing Checklist, and now we move on to Information. You might think the information would come first—and it does, when you’re writing. This part of the editing process is an opportunity to double-check your facts. Writers and motivational speakers often …
Write With Clarity
When writing for a general audience, we want to ensure that the language we use is clear—the opposite of the kind of bafflegab we looked at earlier. ☐ Language is clear and vocabulary is appropriate to the audience. The key to keeping your language clear is ensuring that everything can …