Storytelling for Non-Fiction

Storytelling for fiction is pretty obvious. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s some kind of narrative, and a plot line involving a cast of characters. Storytelling has been around for a long time. It predates writing, and has been used in mythology, fables, fairy tales, sagas, etc. In more contemporary forms, it

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De-Clutter Your Writing

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular construction, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that

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Slang and Colloquialisms

I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’ I think ‘swell’ is lousy, but ‘lousy’ is swell. ~ J.B. Priestley What do you think “far out” might mean to someone trying to learn English? Would they relate it to distance? Could they ever understand that it meant “rad”? Oh, sorry. We meant

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So You Want to Write a Book

For millennia, communicating knowledge in written form has gone through huge changes in technology. First, there were pictures on cave walls (think Lascaux, Native American pictographs). When the alphabet was created, people carved their messages on stone tablets (think Ten Commandments or the Rosetta Stone), or pressed symbols into damp clay (eg, the Sumerians). Share

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Front-Matter and Back-Matter

For those of you who are new to book writing, this is an important question. Here are some basics. Most books may be viewed as having three major internal components (i.e., not counting the front and back covers): the front-matter, the body, and the back-matter. The body is the content of your book. It’s what

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Writers Need Editors Because …

Here at AES, we read a lot of published books (both printed and electronic). And we find lots of errors. This is especially true for self-published works. The question is why? Here are some thoughts. First, the writer introduced the errors—that’s likely because the writer was more interested in telling the story (fiction or non-fiction).

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