the facts by stealth.
It is also appropriate to check national education requirements to see
what schoolchildren need to study. When educational publishers are
looking for material they are also looking to target specific requirements.
Recently I have seen requests for rewritten myths and legends, for
example, and this comes into a non-fiction remit. So, too, have I seen
some great books on mountain biking as a sport, with some outstanding
pictures. The remit is huge. How big is your imagination? If you can
imagine a truly great non-fiction series, there are people out there
waiting for it.
Especially relevant to educational publishing, the literacy hour in
schools (certainly in the UK) has changed the demand for non-fiction
to a quite staggering degree. It is now a major part of literacy in schools.
So the requirements are increasingly challenging, but you need to
know what the literacy demands are. The writer Diana Kimpton, who
also runs the www.wordpool.co.uk website (which is all about writing
for children and I recommend you visit it regularly for updates and useful
information), has kindly allowed me to reproduce the following for you.
The information has been distilled from papers prepared for teachers
about the literacy strategy.
First, all children, even the youngest, are taught how to use a non-
fiction book properly, so even the simplest book needs a contents
page and an index. Page headings and sub-headings are also
important and so are captions for the illustrations. A glossary
is a useful addition too and one welcomed by teachers but it s
not always feasible to put one in a book with only a few lines of
text.
Second, non-fiction for the literacy hour is divided into
categories. You will need to keep these strongly in mind when you
are planning books for the educational market as teachers will want
to know which one your book fits into. Publishers will want to
know this too and they often use the categories as part of the brief
Write the rest 147
when commissioning work. For instance, they may ask for ideas for
non-chronological reports for six-year-olds.
Here s a list of the main categories to help you understand what
everyone is talking about.
Discussion texts
These look at two or more points of view on an issue. They discuss
the pros and cons of each point of view and examine the evidence
for them before drawing a conclusion or leaving the readers to make
up their own minds. Balanced books on controversial topics like fox
hunting and animal experimentation fit here but ones which are
heavily biased in one direction are really persuasive texts.
Explanation texts
As the name suggests, these explain how or why something
happens or answer a question. They include books with titles like
How the universe began, How your body works and What happens to
the food you eat.
Instruction texts
These tell the reader how to do something, often with the help
of lists of instructions and diagrams. How to . . . books fit here, as
do cookery books, art books and books on improving your football.
Persuasive texts
These aim to persuade the reader to agree with the author or to
follow a particular course of action like not smoking or keeping
safe in the sun. Although they may look at alternative opinions,
they don t do this in the balanced way of a discussion text.
Recount texts
These retell a sequence of events in chronological order, although
there is often an introductory section to set the scene. Biographies
148 Write the rest
and autobiographies are recounts. So are books with titles like A
day in the life of a fireman, The discovery of penicillin and The ascent
of Everest.
Reference texts
These present a collection of short pieces of information organised
in a way that makes them easy to locate usually alphabetical.
Encyclopedias, dictionaries and bird books fit in this category.
Report texts or non-chronological reports
These tackle a particular topic like cats, puppets or dinosaurs in a
way that is independent of the passage of time. They often begin
with a general introduction (what s a puppet?), followed by sections
on different aspects of the topic (types of puppet, famous puppets,
puppet theatres, etc.).
As you can see the scope is quite massive. We must go back to one of
the mantras of this book: Research! [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]