Words, Words, Words is the eponymous first lesson in this new course. 

I want to write ... something is the first lesson in the Words on the Page course. 

The question I’m asked most often by genealogists is this:

“How do I write something interesting when I’ve found nothing but dry facts for my ancestor, when I have little more than names and dates?”

     It’s a great question, a valid question. Because we’re unlikely to find much more than names, dates and places for most of our ancestors.  

     However, think about this. For every fact we find about our ancestors, we’ve also found a world of lived experiences. So we can tap into their lived experiences in a way that brings them to life for the reader.

     This does NOT mean fictionalising our family histories. This does NOT mean “recreating” scenes or conversations involving long dead ancestors.

     How can I state this with such certainty?

     Because I don’t make things up in my “popular histories”. My genre is called “narrative nonfiction” – history told as a story – and I’ve worked out how to use the literary tools we all have at our disposal to turn dry facts into exciting narrative. Indeed, The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller is being turned into a $10 million budget, internationally-produced TV series because it's such a fabulous story written in a gripping style. 

Did you know that you can change the dynamic of an entire sentence simply by changing a single word? This is the easiest way to empower our prose and engage our readers.

    This course has ten lessons as follows: 

         1. Words, Words, Words 

          2. The Verve in our Verbs

          3. Adding Oomph to our Genealogy Writing

          4. Passive Power

          5. All that other verb stuff ...

          6. Adventuring with Adverbs

          7. Our Noble Nouns

          8. All that other noun stuff ...

          9. The Objectives of Our Adjectives ....

         10. And everything else ...

     Lesson title slides include the following: