A lot of true crime writers online have a casual relationship with identifying their sources. Many writers do it diligently, but many don’t. As a reader, you’re lucky to get some links at the end of the article.
The writer’s prose may shine, but that’s difficult to notice if you keep wondering how the writer knows what they’re saying is true.
If you don’t tend to identify your sources in your articles, I urge you to reconsider.
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[Photo by Sandeep Swarnkar on Unsplash]
You don’t have to cite your sources. Not really. There are no citation police.
You can get really popular despite not identifying your sources. However, I think there’s an upper limit because people who are used to seeing sourcing in what they read tend to be skeptical when it’s not present, especially when it’s obvious the writer wasn’t present to witness what’s been related.
Citing your sources is a way to be transparent. It shows your readers they can trust you.
It also helps you to be accurate in what you write, which might come as a surprise.
When you’re documenting and sharing where you get your information, it tends to improve your general level of accuracy. You’re keeping track of information and its sources. Citing sources encourages you to compare what you get from different sources and question inconsistencies. Finally, possible scrutiny gives you an extra reason to get things right. Nobody likes being told they got a fact wrong.
Leave a map
The general principle: if a reader wanted to recreate your piece (or at least the facts & information in it), can they use your sourcing as a roadmap?
Consider your options
As long as you’re leaving a map, there are a lot of different ways to do it.
Two useful ways of citing information sources are the academic and journalistic models.
In the academic model, you can have anything from a basic reference list to exhaustive in-line citations and everything in between.
A reference list comes at the end, and you include a list of the resources you use. This is easier for you and can helps with the general readability of your prose. However, it’s harder for anyone to see where individual pieces of information came from. That’s not much of a map.
With inline citations, you also have a corresponding list of sources at the end of the work, but in the body of the work, you include a superscript number or parenthetical citation (often author and date) immediately after each piece of information that lets the reader look up the source from the list at the end. This can allow for a map with a high degree of detail, but at the same time, it can also obscure what you’re trying to say. I’ve read academic journal articles with sentences that contain so many internal citations that it’s a puzzle to parse the sentence itself.
In the journalistic model, you tell readers in the body of the text where significant information comes from. You’ll see this at play whenever you read a news article or watch a news report. This approach adds asides and entire paragraphs, but they are at least helpful to the reader.
Both approaches work.
Strike a balance
The academic approach works well in formal essays, journal articles, and longer works like reports or books.
But for more casual readers of shorter pieces, which online true crime writeups tend to be, I’d opt for something more like the journalistic model.
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A longer, more complete version of this post will be included in this week’s End of Sentence, my free weekly newsletter about nonfiction crime writing. You’re getting it early because you’re one of my patrons.