One of the most frequently asked questions by EditsMadeEasy clients who are exploring the option of writing personal histories is whether they are preparing a memoir or an autobiography. In fact, when many writers feel compelled to record the story of their lives, they often face this question—as well as the questions of which elements the writing requires as critical to the genre, or what must be extrapolated from events, or in just what ways, if any, the memoir and autobiography are different. Or maybe they’re the same thing? While both the memoir and the autobiography have elements in common, there are also ways in which they differ. To determine whether your project falls into one category or the other, here are a few points to consider.

Memoir

The MEMOIR is the less constructed of the two genres. It does not need to span the life of the writer but can be about a single day, a special moment, a fragrance, a particular color (that leads you to recall a shirt of that color that you wore in high school, an event during which you wore the shirt, what your best friend thought about your clothing choices, etc.). These seemingly disparate thoughts are your memories and a memoir is like a memory book; that is, it can be a collection of your thoughts and feelings about any one particular time period, person, place or thing. It is mainly what you remember and not necessarily a detailed account of facts and events as you would find them in a piece of journalism. It is more like a diary entry than a newspaper article.

Let’s say you have decided to capture something from your life experience on paper. This can be a happy or sad event, a life-threatening or life-changing one, or you can simply be compelled to write about why you like to spend time at the beach. You begin to recall your subject and—in the way of all thinking minds—you begin to have many thoughts that seem to be off the topic. For example, the beach recalls a particular bathing suit you owned when you were sixteen, the smell of fried dough wafting across the boardwalk, the diets you were always trying, your envy of your friend’s svelte figure, her parents, parenting your own children, and so on. You seem to ramble on but you eventually bring yourself back to that beach and what pleasure it brings to you and why. That is memoir.

Note that this piece of writing did not necessarily include the day, time and place of your birth, your maternal or paternal grandparents, the story of how or why they came to this country or where they are living now, historical events that shaped you, your spouse, and other factual details of your lifespan. These elements would be some of the things you might include if you were writing an autobiography.

Autobiography

The AUTOBIOGRAPHY, then, is subject to a more structured approach and is considered to be an entire life’s history. Even if you are only sixteen years old, like Justin Bieber, your autobiography must cover the events that led up to the present time and place so the reader gets a sense of your personal history. The autobiography allows less room for mental rambling than the memoir. It should stick to topic, be concise, and take the reader down a particularly straight and narrow path. As a once-popular television detective used to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Just the facts, however, does not mean that your autobiography needs to be dull and lifeless. In fact, it should not be, because the purpose in writing an autobiography at all is to make the seemingly mundane take on a new and vibrant meaning so the events of your life add a new dimension to who you are for the reader. You want to insert your personality into the telling of the events in such a way as to make the reader come away understanding you a bit more, feeling closer to you and empathizing with your choices in some way.

Above all, in both memoir and autobiography, readers must receive some benefit in the long run. Readers should be entertained, or amused, or horrified—if that’s the story you decide to tell. And, while the personal is often the universal, an autobiography that is too far removed from any reader’s experience will fall flat, as will a memoir. Keep your readers in mind at all times—your ideal readers, that is—and your story will become the vehicle by which you reach them and pull them in, whether that  is through a memoir or an autobiography.

Next: How to Identify Your Ideal Reader.

IRENE—Read more about this editor

If you’ve been working in APA-5 and now must switch to using APA-6, certainly one of the most obvious changes will be the formatting of headers. Both editions of the APA Manual of Style provide for up to five levels of headings and subheadings, and both direct that numbers and letters should not be used. But the details of each of those levels have changed.

APA-6 boasts a more streamlined explanation of the formatting of headings, replacing the four separate sections provided in APA-5 (one for each scenario: articles with two levels of headings, articles with three levels of headings, articles with four levels of headings, and articles with five levels of headings). In APA-6, the same material is handled with a simple description:

Regardless of the number of levels of subheading within a section, the heading structure for all sections follows the same top-down progression. Each section starts with the highest level of heading, even if one section may have fewer levels of subheading than another section.

-APA-6, §3.03

As with the earlier edition, APA-6 directs that the label “Introduction” should not be used at the beginning of the manuscript, as it is presumed that the first part of the manuscript is an introduction.

While not as important to the substance of documents as some of the other new features of APA-6, the changes in heading format will likely produce the most readily apparent differences from documents written in APA-5 style. Get this part wrong, therefore, and it will be pretty clear that you didn’t follow the newest version of the APA Manual of Style. That alone makes it a change worth mastering!

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

If you’re old enough to have learned to type on an actual typewriter, as I did, then you undoubtedly learned to use two character spaces (i.e., two taps of the space bar) in between sentences. There was a reason for this: Typewriter type was not proportionally spaced. Since all letters occupied the same amount of space on the page (i.e., an “i” took just as much space as a “w”), placing an extra space after the final punctuation in sentences made the breaks between sentences more readily apparent.

Then came computers—and with them, proportionally spaced type. With the advent of proportional type, extra space between sentences is automatic, making the old double-character-space rule obsolete. And with fully justified texts, the old rule becomes completely irrelevant, since flexible spacing between sentences is one of the vehicles for achieving right justification. Most major style sheets—including APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian—took the position that one space (not two) should be used after final punctuation in sentences.

Until now.

THE NEW RULE IN APA-6 IS

TWO SPACES BETWEEN SENTENCES IN DRAFT MANUSCRIPTS.

Making it clear that this change of rules applies to “draft manuscripts,” the new edition of the APA Manual of Style does not intend to suggest rules for typesetters of journals and books. What about writers of dissertations, theses, and academic papers? Technically, such documents are in final form, not draft. Of course, the best advice is to seek direction from the institution, program, or individual instructor. If these specify APA as the style sheet of choice, though, you should return to the old practice of using two spaces between sentences.

Using the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (16) or the MLA Handbook (7)? Then you’ll likely be sticking with the practice of one space between sentences … But more on that in future posts.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

Although originally conceived for the use of the Psychology community, APA is now the style sheet of choice for a number of disciplines, including Education, Social Work, Nursing, and Business. Many of our clients, therefore, are using APA style in their academic writing. Since the Fall of 2009, when APA released the 6^th edition of its Manual of Style, EME clients have been asking us “WHAT’S NEW?”

APA-6 is the result of a thorough re-working of the widely used style manual. The entire structure of the book has been reorganized with the intention of more closely following the process writers actually follow in their writing. Since the last edition, online research has grown by leaps and bounds, and changes in both computer technology and the publication process have had profound effects on academic writing. With modifications of the guidelines in earlier versions, and with the addition of entirely new sections, APA-6 addresses these changes.

To help users navigate the modifications and new additions in APA-6, the American Psychological Association has prepared a helpful tutorial, available at http://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/whatsnew/index.htm. So that our clients will have a convenient listing of these changes, we have summarized them here, drawing them from the APA tutorial. What follows here is simply a summary of the changes as presented in the APA tutorial. In the weeks ahead, we will examine some of the more significant changes to the APA Manual of Style with new blog articles devoted to each of these topics.

In the meantime, if you have questions about APA-6 or want to share some of the insights you’ve garnered through your own use of the new edition, please feel free to post them as comments to this blog. We’d love to hear from you!

SUMMARY OF CHANGES

·         CHAPTER 1: Ethical Issues

o   NEW: Data retention and sharing (1.08)

o   NEW: Self-plagiarism (1.10)

o   NEW: Publication credit (1.13)

o   NEW: Protecting the rights of research participants (1.11)

o   EXPANDED: Duplicate and piecemeal publication (1.09)

o   EXPANDED: Confidentiality of research participants (1.11)

o   EXPANDED: Conflict of interest (1.12)

·         CHAPTER 2: Journal Article Reporting Standards

o   JARS in the Abstract (2.04)

o   JARS in the Method section (2.06)

o   JARS in the Results section (2.07)

o   JARS in the Discussion section (2.08)

o   NEW: Meta-analyses (2.10)

o   NEW: Using supplemental materials in online supplemental archives (2.13)

o   NEW: Sample papers using the revised rules of style

·         CHAPTER 3: Headings and Reducing Bias in Language

o   MODIFIED: Five levels of headings, simplified (3.02-3.03)

o   NEW: Using heading levels consecutively (3.02-3.03)

o   NEW: historical language that is no longer appropriate (3.17)

o   MODIFIED: Gender (3.12)

o   MODIFIED: Sexual orientation (3.13)

o   MODIFIED: Racial and ethnic identity (3.14)

o   MODIFIED: Disabilities (3.15)

o   MODIFIED: Age (3.16)

o   NEW: Table of recommended changes to language usage available at www.apastyle.org

o    

·         CHAPTER 4: Mechanics of Style

o   MODIFIED: Two spaces instead of one after periods in draft manuscripts (4.01)

o   NEW: Numbers expressing approximate lengths of time written as words (4.31-4.32)

o   NEW: When to use a zero before a decimal fraction (4.35)

o   NEW: Reporting p values to two or three decimal places (4.35)

o   NEW: Reporting effect sizes and confidence intervals with statistics (4.44)

o   NEW: Format for reporting confidence levels (4.44)

·         CHAPTER 5: Displaying Results

o   NEW: Determining the purpose of data displays and designing tables (5.01)

o   NEW: Guidelines on reporting statistical significance in tables (5.15)

o   NEW: New tables, structured according to the kinds of data being displayed

o   NEW: New table examples to illustrate hierarchical multiple regression and multilevel models

o   NEW: Principles of figure use and construction (5.20)

o   NEW:  Presenting electrophysiological, radiological, and biological data (5.26-5.29)

o   NEW: Ethical ramifications of manipulating data in photographic images (5.29)

·         CHAPTER 6: Crediting Sources

o   Definition of “plagiarism” (6.01)

o   Rules for direct quotation of material in text (6.03)

o   Guidance on getting permission to reprint or adapt (6.10)

o   How to construct in-text citations (6.11-6.21)

o   How to construct the reference list

o   NEW: What to cite and recommended level of citation (6.01)

o   NEW: Citing passages from electronic text with no page numbers (6.05)

o   NEW: Citing the archival version or version of record (6.24)

o   EXPANDED: Electronic sources and locator information, with expanded emphasis on DOI (6.31)

o   NEW: What to include as publication information, with focus on electronic sources (6.32)

·         CHAPTER 7: Reference Examples (NEW: Showing electronic and print formats side-by-side within each category of source material, and drawing examples from a wide range of fields)

o   NEW: Data sets and software (7.08)

o   NEW: Internet message boards (7.11)

o   NEW: Archival documents and collections (7.10)

o   NEW: Podcasts (7.07)

·         CHAPTER 8: Publication Process

o   NEW: Peer review (8.01)

o   NEW: Editorial decision-making (8.02)

o   NEW: Getting assistance with scientific writing in English (8.03)

o   CONDENSED: Complying with ethical, legal, and policy requirements (8.04)

This is a brief overview of what’s new in APA-6. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for new posts offering detailed discussions of many of the key changes.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

“Do I need an agent?”

I get this wherever I go, and I always joke with the writer about how their question just crushed my sense of self-worth. But then, I always continue with, “It depends upon what you are writing and what your goals are.”

There are certain types of writing that don’t require an agent, like short stories and poetry. Those you take yourself to the appropriate literary magazines. There are also types of writing that aren’t likely to get an agent, just because of how the market has evolved, like novellas for print outside of romance or sci-fi. But for most full-length pieces, your best bet is usually to seek out an agent. But even then, there are exceptions depending upon the nature of the work and where you want to see it.

For example: I represent memoir. If you have a truly unusual and gripping story and are trying to get it into the hands of Random House, yes, you need an agent. The “Six Sisters” in New York and many of the larger independent presses refuse to look at unagented work simply as a means of reducing the amount of submissions that are unfit for their particular house.

But if you prefer the close relationship of an independent press, or if you just want to pass your story on to your grandchildren, then no, you don’t need an agent. Instead, you would take it to the independent or custom publishers who would work with you directly to give you what you want. And if you then have commercial aspirations, some of them are equipped to guide you in your search for a place in the market. There are plenty of options out there, but I can testify to the strength and expertise of the good people at EME Press.

“What does an agent do?”

This could be its own post. Broadly speaking, an agent will help you edit and steer your manuscript and your presence as an author into the places where they will find the most success in the market. They will be your guide and your publishing guru. They will use their knowledge and connections to find the best possible publisher for your work, pitch it to them in the most effective manner and negotiate the best possible contract for you. They will handle payments and issues and remain by your side for as long as the book is in print.  

“How do I know I’m not getting ripped off?”

There are scams out there, and I advise everyone to stay away from any “agent” who asks for payment up front. Thoroughly read the contract that you are offered, and make sure that you won’t be charged for consulting or editing. The agent should either do this for free themselves or recommend a qualified editor with no financial ties to the agent. This is why I list that I will not offer representation to any of my EME editorial or consulting clients. I would not do so anyway, but to make sure my morals are known, I had it written into my contract and bio at EME.

To prevent even running into con artists, you should seek out agents through the regular methods I listed in my previous post, “How do I find an agent?” Make sure that you can confirm their sale of books to reputable publishers, either by looking in the Acknowledgements section of the books, Publisher’s Marketplace or the industry publications I have listed. If they are new, be sure that they or the agent they are working under can be found using these methods and that they are listed on the website of the agency they claim to be a part of. 

“Then how much should the agent charge?”

An agent should only charge you 15% of what you make on the book sale as well as any copying and shipping costs associated with pitching. The latter is an antiquated practice that is rarely necessary in today’s world of telecommunications and should only occur with your prior expressed consent.

“How will I know an agent is right for me?”

Being offered a contract is a good indicator. I sign far less than one percent of the manuscripts that I have been queried for. I will only work with what is the best possible fit for me in terms of my expertise, my tastes and the piece’s chance of success in the marketplace. Your agent should be able to thoroughly utilize all of those.

Remember that the working relationship between and agent and an author is a very close, very involved one. You will be corresponding with them via email and phone a lot. You will go back and forth with your manuscript and receive a lot of consultation. You need someone that you are able to work with to great extent on a professional level. If an agent doesn’t appear to know your type of work or just plain gives you the willies, it may be in your best interest to seek another agent. Realize that it is not difficult, but just very unlikely that you will find another agent for your manuscript. But don’t let that lead you into a working relationship that you are not able to feel good about.

Questions? Comments? I will be speaking on finding your perfect agent match at the big AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair in Washington, DC next month. If you’re in the area, it’s definitely one to attend.

GORDON—Read more about this editor

I find it fitting that my first blog for EME is about how important it is for an author to blog. As an agent, I greatly prefer an author who has an established online presence. Blogging helps accomplish that, but it also has several secondary benefits.

It helps you build and maintain an audience. Thanks to the internet, an “ivory tower” writer can now reach millions instantly through blogs and the like. Blogs fall into the recent explosion of social media in that they like to have communities. Live Journal was designed around the idea of grouping readers and writers with similar interests to create grand conversations. But no matter which site you choose to host your blog, there are groups you can join that list your blog with those with similar subjects. This kind of networking greatly increases your chances of people stumbling upon your blog. If they enjoy it enough, they’ll subscribe and maybe even tell a friend. And just like that, you have new fans?loyal readers who may be interested in buying your book.

It helps establish you as an expert in your field. If your book is about your experiences as a skydiver, then susieskydives.blogspot.com would be a wonderful opportunity to provide helpful tips, reviews of places you have jumped and maybe even bust a few myths about how dangerous it is thought to be. With the right kind of networking, aspiring skydivers searching the web could find you, see what you have to offer and come back regularly for the valuable information you post. They may even want to buy your book (see a pattern forming here?).

If you are not an expert, blogging can be a way to reach out to those who are. Be a good blogger. Read other blogs. Comment on other blogs. Ask to guest blog or invite others to blog for you. You’ll learn a lot, make some good friends and establish a reputation for being a good literary citizen.

It helps establish you as a real human being. Author blogs tend to be rather informal and conversational in their execution. As a result, a lot of the author’s personality comes through. I tell my authors to aim for this, spicing up their usually informative blogs with an appropriate amount of everyday events that relate to what they are writing about. If your book is about class struggle, your trip to the grocery store or your extreme dislike of cockroaches could very well be presented in a pertinent fashion. Your readers will appreciate the window into your life and develop feelings of kinship and loyalty, perfect for when your book comes out.

It gets you in the habit of writing. Perhaps blogging is not the highest form of literary creation, but it is creation, nonetheless. And to have an effective blog and a prolific writing career, you have to get in the habit of writing regularly. This simple act of taking time out to sit in the chair and get words out onto the page is so important when you go to write “for real.” Writing is like a muscle. You have to exercise it regularly or it will emaciate to the point of uselessness.

It can even kick start a writing session. When the muse is singing, you don’t want to waste that creative burst on a blog post. But sometimes, the vocal cords could use a bit of warming up. Often enough, the hardest part of writing is beginning. The simple, often conversational nature of blog writing is a lot easier to get out onto the page. Once the page is no longer immaculate, it becomes a lot easier to mark up. And once an imagination is in motion, it tends to stay in motion.

Agents ask for it, but it’s best when they don’t have to. The unsolicited keeping of a good blog shows a prospective agent (and later, publisher) that you are serious, proactive and effective in building your platform and marketing your work. I mentioned that I greatly prefer an author with an established blog. But if you don’t have a blog and your project is just too attractive to pass up, I may still sign you and then have you start a blog. Blogs are just about necessary these days. They may take time and effort, but I wouldn’t waste yours if it wasn’t worth it.

It’s fun. No, really. It harkens back to the days of keeping a childhood diary. You can, within reason, write fairly informally about whatever you want and have a great time doing so. Isn’t that why we write in the first place? To have fun? You get to blog. How awesome is that?

GORDON—Read more about this editor

Having trouble deciding whether to outline your whole novel in advance or to let the story (and characters) take you where they will? In this article, one of our novelists tells you how he arrived at a hybrid approach that gave him the perfect combination of freedom and structure.

NO “ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL” APPROACH TO PLANNING

When it comes to writing your novel, how you choose to map out the plot is a lot like how you say “potato” (i.e., po-tae-to or po-tah-to)—there really is no one-size-fits-all right answer (though I am partial to po-tae-to, myself). At one end of the spectrum, there are the writers who outline all of the major plot points of their stories before ever writing a single word of text. And at the other end of the spectrum, there are the writers who forego an outline altogether, opting to let the ideas and plot points flow naturally as they go from prologue to epilogue. If one of these options works for you, who am I to argue? Good job! But in my own writing, I have found that a hybrid approach—combining the two techniques—works best for me.

DISCOVERING A HYBRID APPROACH

With Sunshine’s Darkness (my first novel), the idea for the story came to me as part of an assignment in a writing course that I was taking. To be honest, at the time of the assignment, I really didn’t think the seeds of this story would ever mature to a finished product. Realizing that, I sat down at my keyboard and just started typing out content to fulfill the course requirement. Ideas weren’t fully considered, and even the characters weren’t fleshed out (nor do they necessarily have to be when you first start writing your novel). As I typed out the first ten chapters, I realized how much FUN it was to see ‘where the day took me.’ Since I hadn’t outlined anything, I was free to let the ideas that flowed forth take me in any direction. This was great!

That meant I never had to worry how new twists and turns would affect my end game (because at that time, let’s face it, there was no end game; just a grade). I was free to be creative—and what could be more fun than that?

Two months later, the class ended. But by then, I was so engrossed in writing my novel that I realized it was a project I just had to finish. I was nearing the halfway point. I was also starting to get knots in my stomach, and at first I didn’t know why. It seemed every time I sat down to write, I had the dreaded ‘block.’ Up until then it had been fun to just sit down and let plot twists flow forth as they came to me. Now suddenly I was tensing up every time I sat down to write. Worse, my characters were starting to stress me out because I didn’t know which direction to take them in, nor did I know the answers to two important questions that kept nagging me: “Who lives in my story?” and “Who’s going to die?”

For several days, I focused on mapping out the second half of the book, writing down explicit scenes that each of my main characters would experience, all the way to the final chapter. In many ways, my novel was finished—insofar as the plot was concerned. Now all I had to do was fill in those scenes with prose and I would be done.

What started out as free-flow writing for the first half of my novel blended into a near-rigid outline for the latter half. If someone had told me to outline this novel from the beginning, I don’t think I could have done it. After all, it was the process of discovering who my characters were and what my story was really about that solidified where I would ultimately go with the second half of Sunshine’s Darkness. That freedom to let the plot—and the characters—develop was vital to my story. Likewise, if I had continued a free-flow style of writing, it would have been impossible for me to calculate the exact moments when major plot twists needed to occur in order for certain characters to end up where they needed to be. Put another way:

By adopting the use of the outline for the second half, I was able to weave together the story that had developed freely in the first half, bringing the story to a satisfying and logical conclusion.

FINDING YOUR OWN APPROACH

If you decide to follow my method, you need not follow it to a tee. For example, you might choose to outline in the beginning a few key scenes that you want to take place, while still allowing your characters and plot to develop freely around those scenes. I didn’t do this for Sunshine’s Darkness, but with my second novel I did: I began the novel by outlining three key scenes—and the order I needed to tell about them in order to move the plot along. Likewise, you don’t need to slavishly follow your structured outline in the second half of your book if you come up with some amazing plot twist or new ending that will blow your readers away. For Sunshine’s Darkness, I thought I knew exactly what the last couple of chapters were going to be; but when I got there and it came time to write them, I found several of my characters were still left hanging. So I created a whole new ending that would weave together the characters who still had these loose threads. When something like this develops, you toss your outline aside and wrap up your book with what works best.

But whichever you choose, the one thing to keep in mind is this: It’s the end result that matters. Whichever style you ultimately choose for writing your novel, as long as it gets you to a satisfying, publishable, and FINISHED end-result, then you’ve done your job. Bravo!

So what works for you? Do you map it all out? Do you let it flow freely? Do you have a hybrid approach of your own? Leave a COMMENT to share your own techniques for developing your characters and your stories.

GREG—Read more about this editor

Is it “red, white, and blue,” or is it “red, white and blue”?

Most professional writers will tell you that’s a matter of style. And they’re right. You may choose to place a comma after the next-to-last element in a series (hence the name serial comma) or you may choose to leave it out; neither practice is wrong. What you shouldn’t do is use the serial comma haphazardly or allow your choice to give rise to confusion in your text.

Even if you choose, as a rule, to avoid the serial comma, there may be instances in which it must still be used. Consider, for instance,

John, a teacher and a lawyer

Does this refer to three people (i.e., John and a teacher and a lawyer)? Or is it one person (i.e., John, who is both a teacher and a lawyer)? If the former, the serial comma would make that clear:

John, a teacher, and a lawyer

The serial comma’s use is commonplace in American English usage, though less common in English of the British variety.

Since, in our editing, we try to bring consistency to the use (or nonuse) of the serial comma to the extent possible without causing confusion, I often get asked about the pros and cons of its use. The biggest advantage to the use of the serial comma is clarity: when all of the elements in a series are separated by commas, there is less chance of ambiguity in the list. For example, if I am listing the kinds of sandwiches I’m making for lunch, only the serial comma ensures that it’s clear what I’m actually serving. Consider:

Ham, peanut butter and banana and jelly

Without the serial comma, this may mean:

• Ham
• Peanut butter and banana
• Jelly

Or it may mean:

• Ham
• Peanut butter
• Banana and jelly

In fact, though I wouldn’t want to try it, without the serial comma it could even mean just two kinds of sandwiches:

• Ham, peanut butter, and banana
• Jelly

With the serial comma, the ambiguity is removed:

Ham, peanut butter and banana, and jelly

The strongest reason for ordinarily omitting the serial comma is to conserve space. In fact, it is from the world of newspaper writing that the practice seems to have taken its root in the United States. Among others, the practice of avoiding the serial comma is advocated by the Associated Press Stylebook and the New York Times, along with a number of leading British and Australian stylebooks. In favor of using the serial comma are, among others, the Chicago Manual of Style, the APA Manual, the AMA Manual of Style, the U.S. Government Printing Office, and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

All things being equal, I’m inclined to recommend the serial comma’s use. However, rest assured that—as long as your intended meaning is clear—neither its use nor its nonuse is wrong.

Have thoughts or questions about this topic? Leave us a COMMENT to share.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

The very word “thesis” seems to suggest that you’ve got something to prove—an idea you want to advance. So I suppose it’s no wonder that most of my thesis directing projects began in the same way: with a student appearing at my office to propose the study topic, invariably saying, “I’d like to prove . . .” They always seemed startled when I would respond by asking in return, “Why study the issue if you already know the outcome?”

Thesis and Hypothesis

Of course, every thesis and dissertation is built on some kind of insight—some theory that will be proven or disproven in the course of the study. That is to say, every academic thesis begins with some hypothesis. But if the truth of the hypothesis were clear before the study was even begun, then it would hardly seem worthy of the time, the effort, and the trees that are bound to be sacrificed to the project.  No, if a thesis or dissertation is worth writing, then its outcome has to be an open question—a question no one has yet answered in the way it is being posed in this work.

Willing to be Proven Wrong?

“What is your hypothesis?” After startling my would-be directee with the question about why the thesis should be written at all, my next question was usually about the theory that had inspired the work. And the very next question after that was always as startling as the first: “Are you willing to be proven wrong?” It’s a question worth asking because it gets to the heart of one of the greatest threats to any academic work: BIAS.

We all know the righteous indignation we feel when we discover that the outcome of a legislative process has been designed to benefit a powerful political lobby—that’s bias. We would be horrified to learn that the outcome of a drug’s clinical trial had been bought and paid for by a drug company—that’s bias. But the same is true of the studies that go on in every area of academia. They are intended to be in the service of people’s search for truth—not anyone’s pet idea or fragile ego. We can never divorce ourselves from the perspectives we bring to our work, of course, but those perspectives don’t have to determine the outcome of our research; if an academic is going to make any kind of real contribution to thought, his or her work has to be free of bias. And that means beginning any serious study with the willingness to be proven wrong. The interesting thing is this: a dissertation or thesis project that disproves the author’s hypothesis is every bit as valuable to the academic community as one that proves the author right. And it is just as worthy of the degree—maybe moreso, since that kind of conclusion makes it pretty clear that the author didn’t rig the results.

Sometimes a topic is just too close to the author’s heart to be given the objective study it deserves. What do you do if you find you care about something so much that you couldn’t imagine having your ideas about it proven wrong? Simple: write about something else! Seriously. Odd as it seems, the things we care most about are often the worst topics for our academic study—because academic study requires objectivity. And where we care too much, our study is likely not to be objective. Those may be the topics we have to leave to someone else.

What Is the Point?

All lofty ideas aside, there is a very practical reason why master’s and doctoral students are expected to write theses and dissertations: to learn (and prove that they have learned) the methods and theories involved in conducting serious research in their disciplines. The thesis is a kind of test, proving that one has mastered the skills required to carry on serious research in this field without supervision. The harsh truth is this: if you cut corners and force results when a committee of professors is going to examine your work, the hopes are fairly dim for honest, rigorous research when your only critics are your own students. In short, careful, unbiased research in the thesis develops a habit that is likely to live on in your professional life—and so does its opposite.

OK. Let’s not leave all lofty ideas aside. This one seems worthy of mention here: a rigorously researched dissertation or thesis might just make a contribution to future thought in your field. I suppose we all begin our studies thinking that our brilliant ideas are going to be striking new edifices of thought rising above everything built before us. Then we get bogged down in the tedious details of the research and begin to wonder if we can build anything of value at all. In reality, your master’s or doctoral work will probably not become a skyscraper of its own in the academic city. But it can be the next floor you build on top of someone else’s work. And if you build it carefully—so that it is solid and unshakeable—it may prove to be a good foundation for the work of someone else yet to come. In the world of academia, that kind of collaboration is how really great ideas get built. And isn’t that reason enough to do our work as honestly and carefully—and that means as objectively—as it deserves to be done?

Have some experience with academic writing? Some thoughts on bias in thesis-writing? A question about this topic? Leave us a COMMENT to share.

ALBERT—Read more about this editor

Finding Your Voice 

As a professor of composition and rhetoric, I’ve read countless college essays. I’ve read students’ thoughts about everything from justice in Plato’s Republic to salsa dancing at the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. What I’ve discovered in these essays is that while students often struggle with choosing a topic and sticking to it, their biggest difficulty in writing is finding their voice. By “voice” I mean the expression of their thoughts in a mode that fits both the assignment and its intended audience. Conquering this much-dreaded hurdle, however, requires only three simple things: thought, a clear grasp of the assignment, and an awareness of the reader.

First Requirement: Thought

Whether you’re texting a friend or composing the next great novel, what is made visible in the act of writing is a unique mind, specifically your unique mind. Writing, of whatever sort, is a deeply personal act. And that is no less true when you’re grappling with a European history paper or a chemistry lab report. Even when you’re given a topic you find boring, the more you make an effort to engage thoughtfully with it, the clearer your writing will be.

Second Requirement: A Clear Grasp of the Assignment

The second requirement for finding your voice is to have a clear grasp of the assignment. This is important! If you’re confused or the assignment is very general, catch your professor or TA after class or shoot them a brief e-mail and ask for clarification. This is not brown-nosing; it’s commonsense. You don’t want to waste time or valuable fractions of your GPA by writing an essay that misses the mark.

Third Requirement: An Awareness of the Reader

Developing an awareness of your reader is the final component of finding your voice. For most college essays, your professor is where the proverbial buck stops, meaning you need to maintain an appropriately formal tone and use proper diction in your writing. Texting shorthand is not permissible, nor is slang. And unless the assignment specifically allows first- and second-person references, refrain from using them. A word of caution about vocabulary: six-syllable words dragged out of a thesaurus should not be mistaken for a formal tone. Formality in writing involves using terminology that most clearly expresses your thoughts. The goal in writing is always clarity of expression, and that isn’t guaranteed by the length of the words used.

The Key is You

In brief, the work of writing a college essay involves thinking carefully about a specific assignment and articulating your thoughts in an appropriate manner. The key to this is you—your thoughts. One of the most disheartening things for me as a teacher, besides reading papers where “u” has been substituted for “you,” is when students are completely disengaged from their writing, when their “voice” is absent. Whether you’re summarizing the findings of an interminably long journal article or writing a narrative essay about your career plans, be present to the (clearly grasped) task. This will give you a firm foundation for the (appropriately expressed) accomplishment of it.

Have some questions about your college essay writing? Or some thoughts or experiences you’d like to share? Leave us a COMMENT.

CLARE—Read more about this editor

Online users tend to scan text on a Web page rather than reading the page word-by-word.

Every article you read on writing content for the Web will inform you of this.

What does scanning the text really mean?
How does this affect what content we write?

Useit.com reports on a recent eyetracking study which indicates that users with a high-literacy level read approximately 20 – 28% of the text on a Web page. Often the user will read the first sentence or paragraph of an article then skim vertically down the content with eyes stopping at headings, bullet lists, bolded text, links and numerals. Another sentence or two may be read to see if the content is relevant and useful. The captivated reader will continue reading.

Online users tend to be extremely focused on a specific task or objective. They spend the absolute minimum amount of time on a new page to see if it relevant before moving on to another page, or worse – a competitor.

With a limited amount of time to keep the user’s attention on a Web page and encourage them to read, how do we write compelling and easy-to-read content?

Online Writing Tips—in a Nutshell

• The title of the page is important. The first two words of the title need to be the initial attention grabber. In a navigational menu or a list of pages, it is the first two words of the title that the user will notice.
• Use the inverted pyramid style of writing with the most important points or conclusion first. The interested reader will continue reading to gain the background.
• Keep sentences short yet concise. Long sentences are for print material.
• Be factual and informative. Most online readers are looking for information or researching a product or service. Avoid excessive promotional language and “land-fill” sentences. These are sentences that are used to increase the word count and have no real value to the reader.
• Throughout the page use sub-headings, bolded text, bullet lists and links where appropriate. Avoid massive blocks of text.
• Have clear calls-to-action. Users should not have to look for the next step. Users like actionable content.
• Use numerals instead of spelling out numbers where they represent figures or facts. This is against traditional copywriting standards but is expected when writing for the online medium.

Many writers struggle with the non-traditional methods of writing content for a Web page.  It goes against how we have been taught to write in schools.  The Internet has changed reader behavior so we must be dynamic and cater to these changes.  A great Web site for more information is the Jakob Nielsen site: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/.

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that users with a high-literacy level scan Web content.  How do we cater to the low-literacy user?

We will talk about that in another post.

 [LF1] Link http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html

Have some experience writing effective Web content? Or perhaps a question for our Web expert? Leave us a COMMENT.

LISA—Read more about this editor

What Do We Mean By “Voice”?

One of the most elusive terms when discussing fiction is Voice (especially when it is capitalized). You will hear the word get thrown around in so many different directions and meaning so many different things to so many different people that it often becomes useless when trying to critique a work-in-progress in a workshop setting or within the editor/writer give-and-take. As both a teacher and editor, one of the first things that I try to do with my writers is to settle on a critical vocabulary that we can both understand and agree upon, so that when we get to the nitty-gritty of evaluating and critiquing manuscripts, there are no misunderstandings.

Voice, because of its expansive definition, is one of the most important terms to define and agree upon. Often we hear the term in its more sweeping usage—when, for instance, we speak of a young writer “finding her voice”; or of the “voice of a Dickens, or a García Márquez,” so distinctive on the page that a reader can choose a passage from among many and recognize it as the specific writer’s. On the opposite end of the spectrum, in a much narrower definition, we often hear readers speak of the voice of an individual character—one of the many particulars that differentiate him from other characters. As an editor, I use the term in its more direct relationship to the text or narration, often qualifying it as the narrative voice.

Voice is one of the craft elements that the reader experiences most directly and immediately. There is no story without the narrative voice, whether it is a very familiar first-person narrator or a distant omniscient one. Voice is the lens, the vehicle, through which the reader experiences all the other elements that make up the story. As an editor, therefore, it is important to define this term as precisely as possible, without any of the mythical baggage that comes when speaking about Voice in its capitalized and more mythical form.

Three Modes of Voice

I break the narrative voice into three distinctive categories, which guide the reader through the external world of the story, and through two levels of the internal world of characters. Contemporary fiction depends on these three modes almost exclusively. And as a writer, especially when engaged in the process of middle or late revision, it is important to know the modes the story relies on and the dramatic rationale for such reliance.

• The first mode is the descriptive voice. This is the part of the narrative responsible for relating to the reader most of the external world of the story, including the concrete world, the action, the spoken dialogue, the smells, textures, tastes and so on—essentially anything that can be perceived with the five senses. Very few stories can survive without the descriptive voice, since the world of the senses is the stage where most of our stories take place. 
• The second mode is the reflective voice. This is when the narrative begins to delve into the inner landscape of specific characters. The reflective voice is one of interpretation, processing and judgment on what the descriptive voice has laid out for the reader, whether on an action, a place or another character’s physical quality. Unlike the descriptive voice, which can often belong only to an impersonal third-person narrator, the reflective voice often occurs as a sort of duet, being at once the voice of the narrator and of the specific character whose ruminations we inhabit. Very few examples in contemporary fiction exist without a healthy dose of the reflective voice. In fact, the best of contemporary fiction seems to strike a powerful balance between these first two modes, often weaving them together in the same sentence.
• The third major mode is the direct internal voice, otherwise known in literature courses as stream-of-consciousness. It is an internal mode like the reflective voice, but it often attempts something much more radical: to directly transcribe the thoughts of an individual character as they occur. Some writers, like Proust, argue that such a task is impossible—that, since thoughts occur in the evanescent present, they are therefore not verbal or subject to the linear laws of language. Other writers, like Joyce, spend their whole lives proving that indeed the pattern of thoughts could be replicated on the page.  In contemporary fiction, however, this remains the least deployed of the three modes, but it is nevertheless a very powerful way to approach certain characterizations.

It is through establishing these clear definitions of some of the most difficult terms in the jargon of workshops and editing that I can more confidently approach each manuscript as a coach and editor.

Do you struggle with the issue of voice in your fiction writing? Or perhaps have a question for our novel expert? Or some techniques of your own that you’d like to share? Leave us a COMMENT.

MATEO—Read more about this editor