bloodygranuaile | In belated professional development reads

Having rediscovered my batch of unread editing books during my last bout of quarancleaning book purge, I’m trying to work my way through them. To that end I recently read Brooke Borel’s The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, a thing I probably should have read back when I was editing news instead of technical reports.

While this book is short it is quite thorough, covering the purposes of fact-checking, various craft and administrative aspects of how to do it, advice on working with writers and other types of editors, what kinds of fact-checking are necessary for different forms, and some depressing stuff on the state of the publishing industry. It also has several fact-checking exercises, with instructions clearly written for extremely literal-minded people (a good thing, I think). While the subject matter is by necessity fairly dry, it’s accessibly written and has its moments of humor. I think it’s overall a very solid and helpful resource for its intended audience, especially given how few places have full-time fact-checkers or any kind of training in fact-checking.