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 …
Engaging Prose is Active and Varied
To keep readers engaged with the text, use strong nouns and verbs to construct active sentences. Which isn’t to say every sentence must be in the active voice. ☐ The passive voice is used only when appropriate. Writers are forever being told to avoid the passive voice. You see the …
Write Brightly, but with Restraint
As writers, we want to create strong mental pictures and evoke powerful emotions. Even if your writing is prescriptive rather than narrative, you want to give readers a clear idea of your concepts. ☐ The writing is illuminating and vivid. The foundation of vivid writing is strong nouns and verbs. …
Keep Your Writing Voice Informal
The best journalism, business, and academic writing is as eloquent and enjoyable as the best writing in other genres. Unfortunately, most people do not produce the best writing. Most people produce adequate writing. Since you aspire to be a writer, I trust that regardless of the field in which you …
Use an Authentic Writing Voice
Write the way you speak, only with more polish. You may need to unlearn a lot that you learned in college about writing. Teachers teach academic writing, which tends to be dry, fact-focused, and concerned more with making a point than crafting elegant sentences. ☐ The narrative voice draws the …