In this blog post, we will be continuing to look at how to revise the first draft of your nonfiction book. This time, we will be focusing on the narrower elements, such as sentence structure, spelling and grammar. However, we will start by quickly reviewing why it is necessary to revise your first draft.
Essentially, your first draft should be a rough guide to how you want your finished book to be. Revising your draft should help to polish your writing so that it is at its best when you publish it. You should also find it useful to help you decide which parts to include and which to cut. In addition, careful review and revision might make you think of things that you wouldn’t otherwise, such as new topics you could include to make your book more useful to your readers.
You will also need to do more than one draft review. These blog posts focus on reviewing the first draft, but they could also be applied to later ones. Your book should improve with each draft, so it is worth carrying on until you feel like there isn’t anything else you can think of or you think that you might be changing too much and doing more harm than good!
Sentence Structure
Good sentence structure is vital to ensure that your readers can understand your book. Having your book read well at a sentence level means that they are more likely to be engaged with your writing and helps improve the clarity of your work.
This is not just a case of looking for errors, although you will want to do this too! Instead, focus on making sure your writing flows well and you have a good balance of sentence lengths. If you have a lot of long sentences, try to break these up or cut out words to make them clearer. Vary the way your sentences start to keep your readers engaged.
Consistent Point of View
To avoid your book being confusing for its readers, make sure you choose and stick to a single point of view. Even with a nonfiction book, this is still important. Think about how you will be referring to your reader. If you refer to your reader as “you” this draws them into the book and should make them feel more engaged. Alternatively, using a passive voice and avoiding referring to your readers helps to convey information in an impartial way.
Once you have chosen what point of view best suits your work, make sure you stick to it. As you go through your first draft, highlight any sentences or paragraphs that don’t follow the same system as the rest of your book. As you change them, be careful you change the whole sentence so that it still makes sense.
Spelling and Grammar
Last of all, check through your draft for any spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. You will need to do this after any other checks you have done, as the alterations to fix these could result in new errors being introduced to the writing you have already corrected. You would then need to go back and redo everything you had already checked, which would be rather a waste of your time and effort!
To check your spelling and grammar, you will need to go back to the start of your work again and make any corrections you need. There are some tricks you can use to help you with this. The spelling and grammar check on Word should pick up a lot of errors, but make sure you agree with its corrections! For example, it can flag up names as incorrect, when you have written them right. It could be worth adding unknown words to your spell checker’s dictionary.
However, a spelling and grammar check won’t pick up everything, so you will need to check for yourself as well. Try reading your work out loud, as this can help you pick up on errors that you might have just skipped over before. If possible, get someone else to read it to you. This removes the possibility that you will read what you meant and not notice the errors. You could also use a text-to-speech function on your computer for this.
Plan Your Next Draft
Now that you have finished reviewing and editing your draft, it is time to start gathering all the notes and edits you have made together to write a second draft. Make any edits you need to, expand where necessary and simplify elsewhere. Once you have a second draft, it’s time to start all over again with the revision process!
Wrapping Up
I hope that this helps you with your revision and second draft. In my next blog post, we will be looking at the advantages of using a traditional publisher for your nonfiction book, so come back in two weeks for that!
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