While substance is vital in non-fiction writing, style is important too. How you write is as important as what you write. The style of your piece can mean the difference between being taken seriously and considered a joke, being dismissed as academic claptrap and being understood.
To Tell the Truth is an 18-week mini-series exploring the practical side of non-fiction writing and publishing. The series outline is located here, and previous episodes may be found here. To Tell the Truth is published Monday evenings and is crossed posted at MélangePress.
For more writing and book diaries, visit Write On! on Thursdays, Bookflurries and What Are You Reading on Wednesdays, and Books by Kossacks.
A bit of meta: Sensible Shoes and I had a bit of a disagreement at Bookflurries last week, and while I continue to disagree with her viewpoint, I will continue to keep her link on this series; it is, after all, a solid series on fiction writing.
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Let’s look at some key style points to help you focus your writing:
Know your Audience
If you know your audience, the rest of the points almost resolve themselves. If you are writing for experienced cooks, you can use cooking terms that may require little or no explanation. If you are writing for inexperienced cooks, however, you will have to explain the terms and show them the methods that more experienced cooks take for granted.
That’s a simple example; more difficult is the unintended audience. Let’s say you’ve written a book on using the netroots for promoting progressive politics. Your intended audience is other progressives, who understand your perspective. Your unintended audience may include right-wing activists who are hoping to break your secret code. The truth is, you can’t write for them too. Write for your intended audience – the people you want to engage in this conversation.
Create your Persona
You want people to take you seriously, right? You want people to see you as an authority on the subject, right? Then you will need to write as though you know what you’re talking about. Get your mindset focused on yourself as authority. How you think of yourself is how you will write. If you think of yourself as someone who knows, then that will come out in your writing.
And– unless you are writing a technical manual – you should not divorce personality from your writing. Your voice will emerge whether you plan for it to emerge or not, so plan to let it emerge. Consider whether you will be writing in a personal voice, where you refer to yourself as I and your readers as you, or whether you will be writing in an impersonal voice, where you use one and we. I’d stay away from third-person tone (he, she, they), as it gets hard to manage the gender-neutral language.
Speaking of gender-neutral, a lot has been said and written about keeping gender out of the writing. Sometimes to ill-advised ends; I have a friend who, when I quote something written in a previous century, before "mankind" was considered gender-specific, always corrects it. That drives me nuts – Ralph Waldo Emerson MEANT all humanity when he wrote "mankind", and I am not going to edit his writing to serve gender neutrality. But that being said, if you write in third person, write in third person PLURAL: they, them, their. If you need the singular, use different genders in different examples.
Tone is also an important part of your persona. We are all familiar with how tone translates – or doesn’t – online. How many emails have you seen start flame wars when the author really only meant to give a little information and did so quickly? Get yourself in the right mode, whether it’s playful, pleading, argumentative, serious, or snarky.
Don’t forget to be authentic. "What the hell?" you are thinking. "How do I craft a persona and be authentic at the same time?" No, I am not suggesting the impossible. What I am suggesting, really, is that you claim what is already true – you are the subject matter expert, and you have a perspective on this thing you’re writing about. You are not Al Franken writing as Stuart Smalley – most assuredly a created, inauthentic persona (in other words, a character) – you are still you writing as you. So, be yourself. But be your most authoritative, confident, personal/impersonal, playful/pleading/argumentative/snarky self. (And know that you are good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.)
It is possible to have different personas for diffferent books, too. (Just keep one persona per book, thanks.) Consider these two examples:
A Fourth Turning markes a social watershead of epic proportions. Scarcely 20 years passed between IBM's introduction of the desktop computer and the end of the 20th entury. Yet for most adults, 1980 seems like only yesterday. Twenty years also separates 1929 and 1949, but Americans who remember both dates will tell how much life changed in these two decades. Looking at the head of this chapter ("Hope in the Dark"), readers might soberly consider the regularity of these Turnings and what the next several years might bring.
and
Bloggers were impressed at how gently and carefully Friedberg handled [Rachel Smith] on the stand, as though she might, you know, grab him in a jiu-jitsu wristlock and throw him to the floor just for something to do. But the real news of the day came that 6 ballots had lately been uncovered in Anoka County. All 6 were Coleman votes and if allowed will take Franken’s lead to +219. But there hangs the tale: have their duplicates already been counted? Maybe. (If so, "Petard, meet hoist... over there at the Coleman table.") Are they admissible since the Coleman universe by ECC order Monday is limited to the 4797 ballots already specified and these 6 are NOT ON THE LIST? More to come from Rachel Smith Friday.
Both are written by Carl "Winerev" Eeman - the first from his book Generations of Faith, the second from Recounting Minnesota. Both are non-fiction, both are informative, most definitely in his voice and his style. But you can see the persona is different (and rightly so - could you see the snarky Winerev persona succeeding in his informative volume for congregations?).
Whatever the persona you choose, wear it like a sweater. Wrap yourself in that persona. And then write like it.
Jargon
If you are writing a book on Network Security Auditing, your audience is information technology professionals who are either working as auditors or will have to prepare for auditors. Your audience knows what HTML is. They know what a hacker is, what MD-5 hashing is, what routers and servers are. And yet... there is still room for making sure what might be common terms are clear. I cannot count the number of times, while editing a Cisco Press book, I have asked the author "will your reader understand this term?" Sometimes the answer is yes. But often, the answer is "maybe, but I’ll define it."
Every industry has jargon; the key is to use it appropriately. There’s a wonderful example of what NOT to do by Susan Ross, excerpted in Lynn Bloom’s Fact and Artifact:
A Bureaucrat’s Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies
Total lead time: 35 minutes
Inputs:
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup shortening
...
Guidance:
After procurement actions, decontainerize inputs. Perform measurement tasks on a case-by-case basis. In a mixing type bowl, impact heavily on brown sugar, granulated sugar, softened butter and shortening. Coordinate the interface of eggs and vanilla, avoiding an overrun scenario to the best of your skills and abilities.
At this point in time, leverage flour, baking soda, and salt into a bowl and aggregate. Equalize with prior mixture.
...
Output: Six dozen official chocolate chip cookie units.
Acronyms
What does RFP mean to you? Request for Proposal? Ready for Production? Required Form Process? What about FBI? CIA? Might they have other meanings other than the federal bureaus we think of? Make sure you define every acronym you use.
Now I know you’re thinking, "oh good grief – if I’m writing a book about how the FBI behaved during the Oklahoma City bombing, do I really have to define "FBI"? Probably not explicitly... but it wouldn’t be a bad thing to spell it out in an introduction: "And in the aftermath, no one ever called out the Federal Bureau of Investigation." That way, you’ve said it, you’ve made damn sure that everyone who is reading your book knows you’re talking about that FBI.
Descriptive language
Your use of descriptive language will vary wildly depending on the type of book you’re writing. If your book describes how windmills work, then you will have long descriptions. However, they probably will not be flowery, with passages exploring "the graceful, almost sanguine turn of the windmill’s blade."
In other words descriptive language needs to be appropriate. Diane Ackerman, writing love letters to the senses in A Natural History of the Senses, has more latitude than William Yost in his text The Fundamentals of Hearing.
If you’re writing history or biography, you have even more latitude. Consider this passage from Shelby Foote’s Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian. (The setup: In late 1862, 22 months after being named President, Jefferson Davis has traveled from the Confederate capital at Richmond, VA to his home state of Mississippi and addressed the state legislature in a special session called to hear him the day after Christmas.)
(Davis speaking) ‘The period which has elapsed since I left you is short; for the time which may appear long in the life of a man is short in the history of a nation. And in that short period remarkable changes have been wrought in all the circumstances by which we are surrounded.'
Remarkable changes had indeed been wrought, and of these the most immediately striking to those present, seated row on row beneath him or standing close-packed along the outer aisles, was in the aspect of the man who stood before them, tall and slender, careworn and oracular, in a mote-shot nimbus of hazy noonday sunlight pouring down from the high windows of the hall...
Beautiful, descriptive, and appropriate for a history.
Formalities
Finally, style comes through in how formal or informal your language is. Formal language is impersonal, or even stuffy in some cases. Informally, you might say "Eighty-seven years ago" but formally might choose "Four score and seven years ago" (Thanks, President Lincoln.) Formal language is great for academic tomes, orations, or other writing where you wish to impress with import. Your vocabulary will tend toward standard and perhaps even archaic words, the tome is highly controlled or directed, and the voice is most definitely impersonal.
Informal language, on the other hand, is most assuredly personal, with a wider range of tones, and more conversational words. Sentence complexity is minimized in informal language. Formal writing tends toward complex constructions; I suspect that the more semicolons you see, the more formal the writing is.
Most non-fiction writing fits somewhere in the middle; there’s a little less casualness than you might see in a blog post or a novel, but it isn’t quite so elevated, appearing to waft fully formed and fully unintelligible from the Ivory Tower. In the middle, there’s an authority but an accessibility. I generally recommend striving for that middle ground; you won’t lose your reader, nor will you leave them wanting.
Ultimately, style is personal; you and your editor will determine what works best for your book. If I were to add any final thought, it would be this: be consistent. If you are formal in the first few chapters, be formal in the last few. Maintain that playful persona throughout. Keep your level of description consistent.
Next week, we’ll start adding pictures to your words with some tips on good illustrations. See you then.
Cheers!