in Editing
A working method for fact-checking non-fiction
Fact-checking a book is less about suspicion and more about bookkeeping. A method that makes every claim traceable before anyone asks.
Books are rarely fact-checked by someone other than the author in the way some magazines check articles. The responsibility usually sits with the writer. That makes it worth having a method, because good intentions and a careful memory are not enough across eighty thousand words.
What follows is a practical approach. It is not the only one, but it scales from a short book to a long one.
Keep sources attached from the first draft
Most fact-checking pain comes from claims whose source has been lost. A figure was in an article you read two years ago. A quotation came from a book you returned to the library. By the time you check, you are reconstructing your own research.
The simplest defence is to never write a factual claim without recording where it came from, even in a rough draft. A bracketed note after the sentence is enough: the source, the page, perhaps the date you accessed a web page. It slows drafting slightly and saves a great deal of time later.
Build a claims list
When the draft is stable, go through it and extract every checkable claim into a separate document or spreadsheet. Names and their spellings, dates, numbers, quotations, descriptions of places, sequences of events, attributions of who said or did what.
This feels laborious, and it is. It also changes how you see the manuscript. Claims that seemed obviously true in flowing prose look different on their own in a list, and weak ones become easier to spot.
For each claim, record the source you are relying on and a status: confirmed, needs checking, unsupported, or changed.
Check against the best available source
Go back to the source for every claim, rather than checking against memory or against your own notes. Notes contain transcription errors too.
Prefer primary sources where you can: the document itself rather than a description of it, the original publication rather than a later quotation of it. Where you have to use a secondary source, consider whether it is reliable and whether other reliable sources agree. A single online source that everyone else copies from is still a single source.
Be especially careful with quotations. Famous lines are often misattributed or subtly altered in circulation. Check them against the original text, and if you cannot find the original, say less.
Accuracy is not only about whether each fact is correct. A number can be right and still mislead if its context is missing, such as a total without a time period or a percentage without a base. A sequence of true events can imply a cause that the evidence does not support.
When checking, ask whether a sceptical expert would object to the framing as well as the facts. If they would, adjust the sentence rather than defend it.
Statements about living people carry legal as well as ethical weight. Anything that could damage a real person's reputation needs a firm basis, and in the UK the law of defamation applies to books as much as to newspapers. The detail of that law is beyond a general article, and a manuscript with serious concerns of this kind should be reviewed by a specialist lawyer.
Keep the record
When the book is published, keep the claims list and the sources. Questions from readers, reviewers or later editions are much easier to answer with the evidence to hand.
A fact-checked book is not one in which nothing could be wrong. It is one in which every claim can be traced to its reason.