# Label the Kind of Knowing

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 71 · Part 8: Nonfiction, research, and truth

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> Separate observation, testimony, inference, memory, and speculation.

The ordinary paragraph of nonfiction tends to run in one even voice. Here is an invented one: the mill closed in 1994, Main Street emptied, people stopped trusting the council, the closing broke something in the town that was never repaired, as I remember the foreman saying, and it never will be. Read slowly, that sentence holds six kinds of claim, from a document to a prediction. The grammar gives them all the same footing, and the reader, who cannot see the footing, tends to assume it is firm.

Partway through his account of Egypt, Herodotus stops to tell the reader how he has been working. Everything so far, he says, has been “my own autopsy and judgment and inquiry,” in A. D. Godley’s 1920 translation. From here he will record what the Egyptians told him, “adding something of what I myself have seen.” The next sentence begins *The priests told me*, and the priests go on to say that Min, the first king, dammed the Nile and founded Memphis in the dry ground.

Few writers change gears so openly. People call labeling clutter, and it is, if you do it with brackets and footnotes. Done in the verbs, it is just prose that says how it knows.

Observation means you were there and saw or heard it. Testimony comes from someone else who was there, or says they were. Inference is what you concluded from other things, memory is yours or a source’s retrieved after time, and speculation is what you propose when you do not know. A document is testimony that kept its shape; because it can be checked against other records, the exercise below gives it a letter of its own. None of these outranks the others by rule. A payroll ledger can outweigh my glance at a factory gate, and a woman’s memory of her own wedding can outweigh my inference about her marriage.

Nor does a label certify anything. A writer can say “I saw” and be wrong. The label tells the reader which check applies, not that the check was passed (that work belongs to Practice 72), and the check differs because each kind of knowing fails in its own way. Observation fails by angle: a witness sees one corner of events, as Orwell admitted in the last pages of *Homage to Catalonia* (Practice 73 takes up what that admission does and does not fix). Testimony fails through position and motive, who was placed to know and who gains by the telling. Inference fails at its weakest link, usually the one the writer took without noticing.

Memory fails most deceptively. Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin’s 2003 study had fifty-four Duke students write down how they first heard about the September 11 attacks, along with a memory of an ordinary recent event, and tested them again one, six or thirty-two weeks later. Consistency declined over time, and it did not differ between the two kinds of memory. For the ordinary events, the students’ ratings of vividness, recollection and belief in their accuracy fell as well. For the September 11 memories they did not. The authors concluded that such memories are special only in how accurate they feel.

Not every line should carry a label. A memoir is memory from the first page to the last, and stamping “I remember” on every sentence would bury the book. Label where your account conflicts with another person’s or with a record, or where a detail is carrying part of an argument (see Practice 40 on the memoirist’s several selves).

**Practice.** Take one page of your draft, about five hundred words, and mark each factual claim in the margin: S for seen by me, T for told (and by whom), D for document, I for inferred, M for remembered, a question mark for none of these. Count the marks. Then rewrite the two claims whose grammar most overstates their footing, so that the verb carries the label. The page takes thirty to forty minutes, and it ends marked, with two sentences that now say how you know.

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