When you sit down to write your book — no matter if you start from scratch or use content you already have — you need the pillars of consistency and congruency as your foundation to take readers on a journey with a definitive beginning, middle, and end. Creating this solid structure for your story is imperative to deliver the transformation you promise your readers.
Consistency is key
An author’s job is to keep readers immersed from the first page to the last, and to do that, you need to be consistent. Think of consistency as the mechanics of your story — tone and style, word choice and phrasing, and sentence structure — that play a part in reader engagement and comprehension. When your voice is steady, you take readers through a cohesive journey without being disrupted by abrupt shifts or contradictions.
Tone and Style
Your tone sets the mood for your book and lets the reader know immediately if they can relate to you or not. Do you take a more authoritative stance, or are you more conversational? Perhaps you’re more introspective. Either way, you need to choose your approach and stick to it throughout your book.
Style, on the other hand, is more about how you express yourself. Maybe you include (bad) dad jokes or incorporate slang. This is how you create a sense of familiarity, enhance readability, and deepen the connection with your content.
Phrasing and Word Choice
Your phrasing and word choice play a pivotal role in maintaining consistency. Readers should never feel jolted out of the narrative because you shifted from vocabulary and language most people use in everyday conversation to a stuffy, academic tone and applicable jargon.
When you use words similar in tone and style, you create a more cohesive experience for readers to more easily absorb the information. This also leads to greater trust, making it much more likely for readers to follow the advice you give them and to share your book with others.
Sentence Variety
Consistency is one thing; monotony is quite another. Imagine a book filled only with short sentences or one with sentences that comprise three or more lines of text. Both would cause you to lose interest quickly. Mixing and matching your use of short, long, and complex sentences increases reader engagement and holds their interest.
Congruency locks in your story
If consistency is the key to reader engagement, think of congruency as how you lock readers into your story. Establishing a firm sense of time and place, including well-drawn characters, and ensuring each point has a definitive conclusion provides the clarity readers need to connect to your story on a deeper level.
Establishing Time and Place
A clear sense of time and place is critical for grounding readers in your story. How detailed you get will depend, of course, on whether or not the story you’re telling requires a precise date, time, and address or if a more general description will do. Either way, the goal is to bring readers along for the ride, and they need to know where and when they are in the world of your story to do that.
Importance of Characterization
The phrase, “self-made millionaire” is a misnomer if ever there was one. You didn’t succeed without the help of key individuals along the way, and some folks undoubtedly gave you some trouble as well. Readers need to know about both.
Anyone who played a part in your story needs to be as unique on the page as they are in real life. Speech patterns, personality traits, and notable physical characteristics all help define the people in your story and pull readers in more firmly. You want readers nodding their heads and identifying personalities they recognize in their own personal and professional lives.
Eliminating Loose Ends
At the beginning of your book you promised readers a transformative journey, which means you need to be sure every point you make has its own beginning, middle, and end. Every thread introduced at the beginning of your book should have a resolution.
By answering all questions and resolving each issue you mention, you leave readers with a sense of closure and satisfaction. You reinforce the transformational arc you promised and leave a lasting, positive impression on your readers.
Final thoughts
For an immersive experience, your readers need the smoothest flow of information possible, and consistency plus congruency is how you get them there. I cannot overstate the need for both in your nonfiction book.
Consistency is the key through the use of a specific tone and style, phrasing and word choice, and varied sentence structure. Congruency incorporates a firm sense of time and place, thoughtful characterization, and full resolution to create the lock.
If you’re ready to talk about how to write or create your nonfiction book, please schedule a call.