A biography draft we reviewed made two claims, each cleanly sourced. The subject's company had appeared, correctly cited, on a national list of the fastest-growing private firms in 2019. A separate, equally reputable source, cited two sentences later, reported that companies which had appeared on that list saw their average valuation triple within three years. The sentence that followed said the company's growth was 'understood to have followed a similar trajectory.' No source said that. The draft did.
The reviewer did not dispute either fact. Both checked out exactly as written. What came back tagged was the sentence sitting between them, the bridge nobody else had built. Wikipedia has a name for this: synthesis, the combining of material from separate sources to reach or imply a conclusion that none of them actually states.
Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources.
It is easy to miss doing this, because from the inside it feels like summary rather than invention. Nobody sets out to fabricate a fact, and a fabricated fact is caught quickly, a citation that says nothing of the kind stands out on inspection. Synthesis hides in the connective tissue between two true sentences, in a quiet 'so,' a 'which suggests,' an 'in line with.' Each phrase asserts a relationship the sources themselves never drew.
The fix is not to remove either fact. Both stay, because both are true and both are sourced. What comes out is the sentence joining them. State the two observations as what they are, separate and cited, and stop. If the connection genuinely matters, the remedy is to find a source that draws it explicitly, a profile, an analyst's note, an interview where a journalist or the subject makes the link themselves. Absent that source, the link belongs to the writer, not to the record.
We now read a draft twice: once for what each citation supports on its own, and once for what the sentence sitting between two citations is quietly claiming by itself. A fact passes or fails one at a time. A connective sentence is judged separately, and it is usually where an otherwise well-sourced draft first goes wrong.
