How To Write A Terrible Non-Fiction Book
Most folks read non-fiction, one way or the other. I like non-fiction, myself. That experience of reading it, however, is blighted when I wade through a bad example.
Now, many people like blighting. They thrill to the pain and anger that it causes. If this is you, here are tips that ensure your writing blights like fungus on a rose.
Start Out With Broad Statements That A Person With A Passing Knowledge Of The Subject Knows Is Wrong
I was reading a book about scams through the ages, and the book started a chapter about indulgences by saying that people in the Middle Ages in Europe believed the Earth was flat.
They did not.
It was part of the writer’s explanation of why his decision to call indulgences a scam wasn’t an attack on the Catholic Church. Putting aside the legality/ethicalness of indulgences, he threw out a sweeping statement about how backward the whole Medieval era was and revealed that he knew nothing about the time period.
Once the glaring red flag of a lack of research went up, I was suspicious of the rest of his statements. If he can’t be bothered to find out the state of science in the 1100’s, then why should he be bothered about the details of selling indulgences? And sure enough, the rest of the chapter was more about how a guy name John Tetzel got rich selling them. I think the author was copying the ideas of the one book he used for the chapter. (I assume he read one book. There isn’t a reference page or bibliography. Also, he fell for the flat earth stuff.)
Organization? What Organization?
There is a reason that I put sub-headers in my work. It lets me put all similar ideas in one spot. The paragraph itself may be a disjointed mess, but it is, by God, all about one thing. I have read full books that jump from subject to subject without warning, who include things that seem only tangentially related to the book topic, and where the sequence of the chapters made sense to no one but the author.
The result was chaos. Whatever larger point the writer was going for was diluted to the point of disappearance, and I was left wondering what on Earth they were smoking when they revised their draft.
Lather On The Exclamations
Nothing says professionalism like screaming at your readers.
Often, the writer seems to think that they are being cute and adding a touch of sarcastic charm, but they actually come across as obnoxious and childish.
I know we are trying for the common touch these days, with everyone eschewing elitist ideas such as knowledge and actual expertise, but that chummy tone is misplaced in a non-fiction article or book. I came to you for knowledge. Don’t write like you are just the gal next door who only knows what she has gleaned from random blogs. I’m a content provider: I write those random blogs. I know exactly how little is in them and how hastily slapped together they are. I came to you for more, and the presence of exclamation points tells me that you don’t understand the distinction.
Asides from the tonal inappropriateness, exclamations outside of dialogue is a sign that you don’t know how to craft solid prose. It’s a crutch to shore up the emotion you want to convey. If you have some pride in your ability to convey meaning and ideas through the written word, you should take the time to write sentences that do this without extra punctuation.
Pad With Questions
This one drove me bonkers in ‘The Chariots of the Gods.’ Daniken kept writing questions such as ‘What would they say if-?’ and it reeked of padding.
Doing it once or twice as a transition or as a rhetorical device can feel seamless. Doing it constantly begs readers to answer for themselves.
Not that they will look up the answer themselves, though they might.
No, what I mean is that they will start mentally giving a rhetorical answer that will be more memorable than anything you have to say.
Example: “Could it be that marshmallow fluff is really a cat-alien hybrid?” “No, but your brain is. Get to the point.”
If you must break information that you want to share into a question that you then answer every couple of paragraphs, you are looking to double your word count. Everyone who has written a school paper knows this. It will not please your reader to realize you have 100 pages worth of information, but they must wade through 300 pages to find it.
Go Typo Happy
This is probably the most obvious way to write a terrible non-fiction piece. In this era of self-publishing, we have the option of posting directly to a website without filters.
It shows. People drop words, confuse tenses, and lose commas. When you do this with a book, it is even more noticeable.
It is normal for some small typos to get through the editing process no matter how rigorous it is, and people normally glide right over the occasional misplaced apostrophe. However, there shouldn’t be garbled sentences only an expert can parse, and frequent mistakes start to wear on a reader. After a while, it isn’t worth trying to understand.
It looks lazy too. It’s another sign that you did not care, and the reader will take that to mean that they should not care either. You could at least re-read your work out loud a couple times to fix any missing words.
You can, of course, write something cogent, but then people will think you are a professional or something. They might like reading your work, and you won’t get the ego-trip of making someone suffer. You must decide for yourself if that is worth the effort.