It has some fairly useful information in it, but I also find that it is heavily slanted towards a very liberal mind set.
If you read the parts that speak about offending people, you will quickly find that your story will become so limited in the word choice you can use and descriptions you can use that you almost are making a cookie cutter book anymore.
More over, the offense section of this guide states that you ought just describe every color that your characters are. Yet I am told by people who read my writing, that they feel calling a character by the color of their skin is offensive. (some of these readers are teachers, lawyers and musicians.)
So what you have here is a conundrum of having to chose one group or the other to offend. You can refer to someone with light black skin as chocolate and break this guides Prohibition on referring to people by the color of food, or you can define the character as a mixed race, black individual. Either way, you will offend one group or the other.
Personally I don't describe race very often, mostly because my stories deal with 500 years from today. Many of the races will likely be more mixed and one would hope that the impoverished nations would be risen up to a level of education more equal with the richer nations of the world with the world having a single primary language with secondary cultural languages.
That said, even in 500 years, we will have people of color, darker than white and whiter than dark.
I would rather be blunt about color, but I am generally blunt.
Has anyone ever come across a resource like this tailored towards non-fiction (like self-help or lifestyle...similar to Stephen Covey's books)? I would really like to find something like this to guide me in writing my book, but everything I find is mainly tailored towards fiction (character and plot development, which I don't need). Thanks for your help!
