From Cover to Cover (5 page)
Read From Cover to Cover Online
Authors: Kathleen T. Horning
Look at the placement of illustrations. Do they generally appear next to the text that discusses what they picture, or do readers have to do a lot of flipping back and forth to match text with pictures? Do the illustrations frequently break up the flow of the text, or do they enhance it?
While background research, organization and structure, design and illustrations are all used to present information to children, writing style ultimately brings the subject to life. Clear prose that engages the reader, stirs the imagination, and awakens the mind is every bit as important in works of nonfiction as it is in fiction. When the author has a passion for the subject matter, that enthusiasm is transferred to the reader through his or her writing style.
Laurence Pringle is a master at writing dynamic prose in his science books for children. By doing so, he makes his subject matter more interesting by demonstrating the nature of scientific inquiry—or what many writers refer to as the “scientific attitude.”
Consider the way he opens
Alligators and Crocodiles! Strange and Wonderful
, an introduction to crocodilians for very young children:
Erk, erk, erk. Erk, erk, erk, erk.
Baby alligators called to their mother. They called from inside their eggs, which she had buried within a mound of grasses and other plants. For more than two months, the mother alligator had guarded the eggs in the nest. Now about forty baby alligators were ready to hatch.
Erk, erk, erk, the babies called. Where was their mother?
Pringle uses the drama inherent in the natural world to capture children’s attention. In just a few short sentences, he provides quite a bit of information about alligators: They lay eggs; they build nests on the ground out of grasses and other plants; it takes two months for the eggs to hatch, during which time the mother guards the nest; they have about forty hatchlings; and when the babies are ready to hatch, they call to their mother. In spite of the simplicity of the language Pringle uses, he
does not talk down to his young readers. His tone shows that he has respect for their intelligence.
Pringle enlivens his prose by using a conversational tone that is made up of everyday language, includes questions, and occasionally addresses the reader directly by using the second person. The author’s mood toward both subject and audience is expressed through tone. In nonfiction, we see a range of tones used successfully.
As Pringle demonstrates, a conversational tone is frequently used in books of information for young children. It appears less frequently in books for older readers. However, Kadir Nelson used a conversational tone ingeniously in
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball
:
By the late 1800s, Negroes began to disappear from professional baseball teams and were soon gone from them altogether. Now, there was never any written rule that prohibited Negroes from playing professional baseball, but soon after 1887, somehow Negroes all over couldn’t
get
on a professional baseball team. Come to find out that all the white owners had gotten together in secret and decided to do away with Negroes in professional baseball. They agreed not to add any more to their teams and to let go of the ones they had. Called it a “gentleman’s agreement.” And I’ll tell you this, the white pro-ball-club owners held to that agreement for sixty years.
Nelson’s conversational tone gives readers the sense that they are hearing the history recounted by one of the old-timers who experienced it all firsthand, a device that really brings the history to life as it brings readers closer to the subject.
A humorous tone is the hallmark of Joanna Cole’s Magic School Bus
books and is employed brilliantly as well in Sid Fleischman’s
The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West
:
At the same time, Clemens reacted with dismay at the gross humbugability of his fellow man. This judgment would agitate his sensibilities until he petrified into a public scold. So ruffled did he become at the human gift for homespun ignorance and hypocrisy, for greed and crackpot bigotry, that he would become a one-man firing squad.
“Our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey,” he declared.
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
Fleischman’s bombastic prose, with its frequent hyperbole and clever turns of phrase, pays homage to Twain’s own witty style.
Unfortunately, in lesser hands, attempts at a humorous tone in informational books for children fall flat, and the books end up sounding condescending or just plain silly. But when authors know their subjects well and have respect for the intelligence of their audience, a humorous tone can add a great deal of appeal to a book of information.
Sally M. Walker’s book
Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving the Mysteries of the H. L. Hunley
uses a neutral tone by presenting its information matter-of-factly, as can be seen in the following example:
As Owsley assessed the bones’ visible features, he saw no evidence of physical trauma that would indicate that the crew had struggled during an attempt to escape from the submarine. As the
archaeologists had surmised from the locations and positions of some of the remains, it appeared that the men had died in or near their assigned stations.
Note the precision and clarity of Walker’s language as she presents and interprets evidence from the 130-year-old wreck. Her use of words such as “surmised” and “appeared” provides a constant reminder of the theoretical nature of history and science. It also signals a distinction between fact and informed opinion, and demonstrates the nature of true scholarship.
An author who cares deeply about his or her subject matter may take a partisan tone in nonfiction. In his powerful social histories for young readers, Milton Meltzer is known and respected for the strong partisan tone he takes. Writing about his book
Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust
, he comments: “Terrible and complex as the events were, they can be brought within the range of understanding if the reader is helped to see them from the inside. If a reader can be made to feel, to care, he or she will be much more ready to understand.”
Walter Dean Myers skillfully uses matter-of-fact descriptions of historical events to support and explain his partisan tone in
Now Is Your Time! The African-American Struggle for Freedom
:
What was it like to be called a slave? What was it like to be “owned” by someone? There is no single answer to this question. There is the common experience of being considered inferior, of being bought and sold as if one were a horse or household furniture. Many people who sold Africans would often add a few household items to the sale so that they did not appear to be “slave dealers.” Most plantation owners did not seem to realize that the Africans hated the very idea of not being free. (George Washington, in August of 1761, complained
that his Africans ran away without cause.) But the best way to find out what it was like to spend a lifetime in bondage is to read the documents from those days.
Myers then goes on to present primary evidence from firsthand accounts written in the nineteenth century in reports, letters, reminiscences, and business statements, allowing readers to, in Milton Meltzer’s terms, “see them from the inside.”
More recently, Tanya Lee Stone’s
Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream
takes a partisan tone to show how strongly the author feels about the inequities suffered by women in the United States space program:
But that phrase, “before their time,” gets right to the heart of the problem. Why should there ever be a particular time that’s right or wrong for any group of people? It’s not that the thirteen women were outsiders trying to push their way in where they didn’t belong. It’s that what John Glenn called the “social order” of the time shut out strong, qualified women not because they weren’t capable enough but
because
they were women.
Like Myers, Stone tempers her partisan tone with a neutral one as she describes the training the thirteen women underwent in the early days of NASA, before they were cut from the program.
To evaluate the writing style in nonfiction, it may be helpful to ask yourself the following questions: Is the prose clear and dynamic? What kinds of words and sentences are used to get the ideas across to young readers? Does the author use a creative or original approach to the subject matter? Does the text present principles and concepts, building on a logical development
of ideas, rather than merely reciting facts and figures? What sort of tone does the author use, and is it appropriate for the subject matter? Is this a book I would want to read aloud to a child or group of children?
By documentation we generally mean a bibliography of sources that were consulted by the writer while doing background research. Documentation can also refer to footnotes or endnotes that cite sources for direct quotes and specific pieces of information.
Most bibliographies of sources that were consulted as research appear at the back of the book. Source material can be divided into two categories: primary and secondary. The use of primary sources indicates that the author has done original research, which is becoming more and more common in children’s nonfiction. To do the research for her biography of Harper Lee for Viking’s Up Close Author series, Kerry Madden traveled three times to Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Harper Lee is famously private and does not grant interviews, but Madden was able to talk with many people who grew up with her, including Truman Capote’s cousin who had been Lee’s childhood friend. Madden was able to use other primary sources available at the Monroe County Heritage Museum and at the Old Courthouse Museum in Monroeville. In addition, she used secondary sources, such as original articles and interviews from newspapers and magazines written at the time
To Kill a Mockingbird
was first published and then made into a film version. All these sources helped her create a full portrait of a woman few have had a chance to get to know.
Photo-essays that use the photodocumentary technique are, by definition, based on primary research. The photographs themselves, in addition to personal interviews woven into the text, provide the author’s documentation. One would not expect to find a bibliography of sources
in this sort of photo-essay unless the author has brought in additional information from secondary sources.
Most writers of children’s nonfiction rely on secondary sources, such as books and articles that have been written by others on the topic. Take a look at the sources listed in the book you are reviewing. Are they up-to-date? Do cited articles appear in popular magazines such as
National Geographic
, or do they come from scholarly sources? One of these is not necessarily superior to the other, but a critical look at sources may give you a picture of the depth of the writer’s expertise in the subject.
Another type of bibliography that frequently appears in the back of children’s nonfiction is a list of suggested or further reading. The titles given there are generally aimed at young readers. It is sometimes unclear whether they were sources used by the author in his or her research. Some bibliographies integrate adult and children’s material; when they do, they often indicate which titles would be appropriate for young readers.
Many authors also include notes that document sources of direct quotations used in the body of the book. The practice of using footnotes, or citations that appear at the bottom of the page on which the quote appears, is rare in children’s books, most likely because footnotes are considered to be more of an academic convention than part of the art of nonfiction writing for children.
Notes from the author at the back of the book seem to be a type of documentation that is aimed at both child and adult readers. Jim Murphy is known for his lively accounts of historical events that are pulled together from multiple firsthand accounts. The notes about his sources in
An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793
provide readers with additional information about the varied perspectives of his sources. Writing about one of his sources, J. Henry Helmuth’s
A Short Account of the Yellow Fever in
Philadelphia: For the Reflecting Christian
(1794), Murphy states: “His aim was to convince readers that the fever was a warning from God for the sins of the entire community. One way he attempted to do this was by writing detailed ‘you are there’ scenes of the devastation.” Murphy’s notes are as entertaining as they are enlightening, and they help readers understand the context in which the accounts were written.
Many critics of children’s nonfiction feel quite strongly about the documentation of sources, and yet there doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus as to what level and type of documentation should be used. There is more agreement among adults about
why
information should be documented than
how
authors should do it, and the most common reason given is for the benefit of child readers. As Sandip Wilson points out in her excellent article “Getting Down to the Facts in Children’s Nonfiction Literature: A Case for the Importance of Sources,” sources go beyond answering the basic question of “How does the author know that?” to showing children the important conventions of nonfiction literature.
Both these roles can be seen in the exemplary notes provided by Scott Reynolds Nelson and Marc Aronson in their book
Ain’t Nothing but a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry
. In addition to notes about sources and an annotated bibliography suggesting further readings, Marc Aronson has provided a short essay called “How to Be a Historian” that outlines six steps, using examples from Nelson’s John Henry research to illustrate his points. This directly engages young readers in the actual research methodology used by historians, as it tells them something about how Nelson gathered his historical evidence.
