How to Use Notes and Bibliographies

The next item on the Nonfiction Editing Checklist has to do with citing your sources: ☐ Footnotes, endnotes, invisible notes, and reference lists have been used appropriately and are formatted correctly. The Chicago Manual of Style offers several options for citing your sources. The first of these is the least …

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, …

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 …