If you are a teacher or trainer, then you have a lot of material. You have hours of lectures and piles of handouts. You know your stuff inside and out. Even better, you have learned a lot about presentations. You know the "Tell, tell, tell" rule. Your PowerPoint slides are supportive without being too text-filled or too distracting. You have mastered the transition so that your students/audience know what you’re talking about and can draw the connections by listening to you.
Very little of this helps when writing your book.
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.
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(Meta: Apologies for being late - had a meeting go long.)
Yes, it helps that you know your subject matter, know how one topic builds on the next, and you do have those charts and graphs and images that support your work. But the rest? Well... let’s look at what you do in presentations and translate them to your book.
(For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call any presentations, lectures, classes, seminars, and workshops "presentations" and your audience, clients, attendees, and students "audience".)
Tell, Tell, Tell
We follow this formula – tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and tell ‘em what you told ‘em – because your audience don’t have a book in front of them – and often don’t have notes either. There is a lot of psychology and educational pedagogy surrounding the effectiveness of this formula – if you’re dying to know, use your Google-Fu.
However, "tell, tell, tell" doesn’t work in a book. In fact, it will bore and annoy your reader. As an example, here’s the start of a chapter as the author sent it to me:
Configuring router switches for communication
In the previous section, I described the basic types of router switches. In the next section, we will define the uses of these switches in various communications configurations.
There are four scenarios that require router switches in enterprise-wide communication configurations. These four scenarios include the following:
See what I mean? We just want to get on with it already. We applied the following techniques to these (and other) passages:
Introducing topics
The first thing to remember is that you tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em in your introduction – and then, pretty much, you don’t have to do much more. Your chapter introductions should not, as a rule, include phrases like "in this chapter, we will discuss..." Instead, give us a real introduction to the topic itself. Instead of "in this chapter, we will learn about jam," you can start us with "Jam is a fruit spread with some seeds, pulp, or skins left in."
Making transitions
Guess what. You don’t have to say "in the previous section, we discussed jams. In this chapter, we’ll discuss jellies." Your reader will know you’ve moved on. How? By reading the section header. "JELLIES" is a pretty good clue. Now you can do some transitional stuff like "unlike jams, jellies contain no seeds, pulp, or skins." That’s a nice launch and a vague reminder of what the reader just read. And if they have forgotten, they can flip back a page. Books are handy that way.
Telling ‘em What You Told ‘em
Conclusions will vary. Sometimes, you have a genre that requires a summary (especially if you expect your book to be used as a study guide or textbook). But mostly, you can just end the chapter with the last bit of information. Or if you really want a transition, you can end a chapter with "in the next chapter, we’ll explore preserves" (much like I’ve been doing in this series).
The resulting introduction to the chapter was much smoother – and infinitely shorter:
Configuring router switches for communication
Router switches are required in the following four enterprise-wide communication configurations:
The reader had just read about the switches. He’s on the same page. Literally.
Bullet Points
In a typical presentation, you will list the bullet points of a topic, then go into detail on them (which gives your audience a preview of what you’re going to talk about). The slides will look like this:
The men in Margaret Houlihan’s Life:
• Frank Burns
• Donald Penobscot
• Hawkeye Pierce
• Jack Scully
Then you’ll do a series of slides with more information:
Frank Burns:
• Married to Louise; number and gender of children unclear
• Nicknames: Ferret Face, Chinless Wonder
• Would not leave Louise for Margaret
• Stood as best man at Margaret’s wedding
• Last hurrah: diving into a Japanese bath with a naked General & Mrs. Kessler
Etc...
Now in a book, you don’t need to do all of that prep. You can simply say
There were four significant men in Margaret’s tenure at M*A*S*H 4077th.
Major Frank Burns
Frank was a married man who carried on a four-season affair with Margaret. His wife, Louise, may have suspected, as evidenced by the "Dear John" letter Frank receives in the "Mail Call, Again" episode. However...
Etc...
It’s economy of space and motion. Now I have worked on some technical manuals that will still list the items and then go into detail, but I find that distracting and wasteful. It’s good for a textbook, crap for just about everything else.
Checking In
When you are presenting, you get feedback. It might be vocalized responses, nods, confused looks, or the clunk of a head on the desk, but it is feedback. And you know how to handle it. The blank stare probably means you should stop and review, perhaps asking "does this make sense" or "are there any questions before I go on"... nods let you know they understand. The clunk, well, that might have more to do with the all-nighters they pulled than your delivery, but if you keep putting them to sleep...well...
Anyway, in a book, you don’t get feedback. You have no idea whether your readers understand your point or not. You have to take it on faith that they do, and that you’ve given suitable examples. I suspect this is why you run into some books with three or four examples of a concept when one would do – it’s overcompensation for not getting feedback. To remedy this, offer one example, and trust your editors to let you know if the point isn’t clear.
I will talk more about editors in week 14, but if you are planning to publish without an editor, you’re a fool (the same kind of fool who represents himself in court or tries to treat himself medically). If your publisher doesn’t have editors, hire them. If they do, listen to them. They very likely know very little about your topic, and their fresh eyes will provide the feedback you need.
Next time, we’ll talk about style – voice, tone, audience, jargon, and your persona. See you next week!
Cheers!