Be a Better Writer--NONFICTION AND RESEARCH
Posted: Sat Sep 12, 2015 9:09 am
When I was teaching high school, I frequently asked my students to write reports of varying lengths—from short paragraphs on a particular topic to full-length term papers. The absolute most difficult thing for them to grasp was how to use research from other sources.
Last week’s lesson for fiction writers covered how to write factual information without sounding like an encyclopedia entry. That’s even more important for writers of nonfiction—while some nonfiction is necessarily dry and purely factual, not all nonfiction must be so. If it’s appropriate for your intended audience, there’s no reason why nonfiction can’t also be beautiful writing.
Here are a few examples, using the same research:
1. The Ivory Coast, which produces more cocoa than any other country in the world, extensively uses child labor in the harvesting of cacao. In fact, although Americans tend to feel that slavery is a thing of the past, there are over 200,000 children working on cacao plantations in west Africa, and as many as 12,000 of them are victims of human trafficking. This is dangerous work; children toil long hours handling plants that have been sprayed with pesticides, and they are often injured by sharp knives or machetes.
2. A boy, not yet eleven years old, grasps a branch of a cacao tree and hacks at the ripened bean with a machete. It is early morning; he will repeat this action hundreds of times throughout the long, hot day. He has stopped thinking of his mother’s cries, her reaching arms as he was snatched away—he learned weeks ago that when he wipes the tears from his eyes, they burn from the chemicals sprayed on the cacao trees. He does not know that there are thousands of boys just like him—he only knows the hot sun and the cacao beans and his machete. He has never tasted chocolate, and he does not know that the finest chocolate is exactly the color of his glistening skin.
Of course, if you’re writing an academic paper or report, you’ll need to include more actual facts and statistics. But if you’re writing for the Weekly Challenge, or for a blog, or for an audience for whom you want your writing to have an emotional impact, you’ll want to use some of the techniques of creative nonfiction. Those include all of the best characteristics of fiction writing: interesting word choice, varied sentence structure, use of figurative language, imagery, characterization, dialogue, and many more.
For a really good example of well-written nonfiction which uses researched facts, try almost anything written by Bill Bryson. I especially loved One Summer: America, 1927.
By the way, I got the information in the paragraphs above (a particular interest of mine) from the Wikipedia entries on children in cocoa production, which leads me into the topic of plagiarism.
Some of my high school students, unfortunately, would copy entire sentences or paragraphs from their sources. Happily, that didn’t occur often, but it was common to get students who never grasped the difference between research and plagiarism; they felt if they changed one or two words to synonyms, or if they slightly rearranged a sentence, then the report was now “in their own words.”
In my decade at FaithWriters, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an instance of intentional plagiarism. But it is important, I think, to understand the degrees of plagiarism—you may be surprised at what constitutes plagiarism in your writing.
There are three types of plagiarism. The first type occurs when someone uses another author’s exact words without indicating that he is doing so. The same is true if the words are lifted from a song, a movie, a speech, etc., etc. Depending on the situation, even a single word might need to be indicated as a direct quotation. Proper attribution will require opening and closing quotation marks for shorter quotations OR “blocking” the quotation for longer ones.
Okay…now look back at that previous paragraph. I didn’t write it; my friend Steve Fitschen did, at my request. He’s a lawyer, and he’s taught legal writing at the college level, so I figured he’d know more than I do about the subject. So I definitely should have blocked that paragraph, or put it in quotation marks with Steve’s name as the author.
Steve went on to say: “The second type [of plagiarism] occurs in the manner you described—the writer uses someone else’s writing as a starting point and merely rearranges the sentence structure and/or substitutes synonyms. Most people understand that if you do this WITHOUT attribution, you have committed plagiarism. However, many people do not understand that if you do this WITH attribution, you have STILL committed plagiarism.”
If I were tempted to try to fiddle with Steve’s words to pass them off as my own, I might have done something like this:
…Writers sometimes use other people’s writing as a starting point and simply substitute words that mean the same thing or rearrange the sentence structure.
I hope you can see that even though I changed that first sentence, it is not my writing. I couldn’t have come up with that sentence without Steve’s sentence existing first.
Finally, there’s this (still Steve): “The third type of plagiarism occurs when someone uses someone else’s IDEA(S) without attribution, even though it/they has/have been paraphrased or summarized. This is true whether the amount of material used comes from a couple of sentences or multiple pages or more. Attribution is still required through inline citation(s) or note(s).”
Now back to me—keep in mind that if you’re writing an academic paper, you’ll definitely want to use the attribution and citation style that your professor requires. Obviously, I’ve not done that here, because this is a very casual forum. FaithWriters doesn’t have a mandated citation style; nevertheless, when you’ve used research, you need to cite it as an author’s note after your piece. Include enough information so that your readers can find your source. If you’re self-publishing something, look up citation styles and find one that seems appropriate for your material. If someone else is publishing your writing, you’ll work with them to provide proper attributions.
HOMEWORK: Go back to my cacao slavery examples above. Write two similar paragraphs on a topic that's of interest to you using research—one paragraph that’s heavy on facts and statistics, and the other that uses good writing to provide the same information. Keep your paragraphs approximately the same length as mine, above. (Don’t forget to provide your source/s).
Do you have a comment or question about using research in nonfiction? About creative nonfiction? About citing one’s sources? About what constitutes plagiarism? Post it here.
Last week’s lesson for fiction writers covered how to write factual information without sounding like an encyclopedia entry. That’s even more important for writers of nonfiction—while some nonfiction is necessarily dry and purely factual, not all nonfiction must be so. If it’s appropriate for your intended audience, there’s no reason why nonfiction can’t also be beautiful writing.
Here are a few examples, using the same research:
1. The Ivory Coast, which produces more cocoa than any other country in the world, extensively uses child labor in the harvesting of cacao. In fact, although Americans tend to feel that slavery is a thing of the past, there are over 200,000 children working on cacao plantations in west Africa, and as many as 12,000 of them are victims of human trafficking. This is dangerous work; children toil long hours handling plants that have been sprayed with pesticides, and they are often injured by sharp knives or machetes.
2. A boy, not yet eleven years old, grasps a branch of a cacao tree and hacks at the ripened bean with a machete. It is early morning; he will repeat this action hundreds of times throughout the long, hot day. He has stopped thinking of his mother’s cries, her reaching arms as he was snatched away—he learned weeks ago that when he wipes the tears from his eyes, they burn from the chemicals sprayed on the cacao trees. He does not know that there are thousands of boys just like him—he only knows the hot sun and the cacao beans and his machete. He has never tasted chocolate, and he does not know that the finest chocolate is exactly the color of his glistening skin.
Of course, if you’re writing an academic paper or report, you’ll need to include more actual facts and statistics. But if you’re writing for the Weekly Challenge, or for a blog, or for an audience for whom you want your writing to have an emotional impact, you’ll want to use some of the techniques of creative nonfiction. Those include all of the best characteristics of fiction writing: interesting word choice, varied sentence structure, use of figurative language, imagery, characterization, dialogue, and many more.
For a really good example of well-written nonfiction which uses researched facts, try almost anything written by Bill Bryson. I especially loved One Summer: America, 1927.
By the way, I got the information in the paragraphs above (a particular interest of mine) from the Wikipedia entries on children in cocoa production, which leads me into the topic of plagiarism.
Some of my high school students, unfortunately, would copy entire sentences or paragraphs from their sources. Happily, that didn’t occur often, but it was common to get students who never grasped the difference between research and plagiarism; they felt if they changed one or two words to synonyms, or if they slightly rearranged a sentence, then the report was now “in their own words.”
In my decade at FaithWriters, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an instance of intentional plagiarism. But it is important, I think, to understand the degrees of plagiarism—you may be surprised at what constitutes plagiarism in your writing.
There are three types of plagiarism. The first type occurs when someone uses another author’s exact words without indicating that he is doing so. The same is true if the words are lifted from a song, a movie, a speech, etc., etc. Depending on the situation, even a single word might need to be indicated as a direct quotation. Proper attribution will require opening and closing quotation marks for shorter quotations OR “blocking” the quotation for longer ones.
Okay…now look back at that previous paragraph. I didn’t write it; my friend Steve Fitschen did, at my request. He’s a lawyer, and he’s taught legal writing at the college level, so I figured he’d know more than I do about the subject. So I definitely should have blocked that paragraph, or put it in quotation marks with Steve’s name as the author.
Steve went on to say: “The second type [of plagiarism] occurs in the manner you described—the writer uses someone else’s writing as a starting point and merely rearranges the sentence structure and/or substitutes synonyms. Most people understand that if you do this WITHOUT attribution, you have committed plagiarism. However, many people do not understand that if you do this WITH attribution, you have STILL committed plagiarism.”
If I were tempted to try to fiddle with Steve’s words to pass them off as my own, I might have done something like this:
…Writers sometimes use other people’s writing as a starting point and simply substitute words that mean the same thing or rearrange the sentence structure.
I hope you can see that even though I changed that first sentence, it is not my writing. I couldn’t have come up with that sentence without Steve’s sentence existing first.
Finally, there’s this (still Steve): “The third type of plagiarism occurs when someone uses someone else’s IDEA(S) without attribution, even though it/they has/have been paraphrased or summarized. This is true whether the amount of material used comes from a couple of sentences or multiple pages or more. Attribution is still required through inline citation(s) or note(s).”
Now back to me—keep in mind that if you’re writing an academic paper, you’ll definitely want to use the attribution and citation style that your professor requires. Obviously, I’ve not done that here, because this is a very casual forum. FaithWriters doesn’t have a mandated citation style; nevertheless, when you’ve used research, you need to cite it as an author’s note after your piece. Include enough information so that your readers can find your source. If you’re self-publishing something, look up citation styles and find one that seems appropriate for your material. If someone else is publishing your writing, you’ll work with them to provide proper attributions.
HOMEWORK: Go back to my cacao slavery examples above. Write two similar paragraphs on a topic that's of interest to you using research—one paragraph that’s heavy on facts and statistics, and the other that uses good writing to provide the same information. Keep your paragraphs approximately the same length as mine, above. (Don’t forget to provide your source/s).
Do you have a comment or question about using research in nonfiction? About creative nonfiction? About citing one’s sources? About what constitutes plagiarism? Post it here.