Rules of Thumb

There are lots of writing techniques I've practiced on this project. Here is one: when you're gonna assert something audacious and wildly off-the-wall, it's better to capture it in a quotation or an extended excerpt than to use the omniscient narrator voice.

Much more powerful and distinctive that way. I think the more you buffet the reader with "I know more than you" narration, the more the reader tunes you out. It's okay for an academic position paper where the point is for you to engage in debate, but in a fiction-style biographical narrative, I think it gets annoying and it distracts from the subject.