Two intrepid librarians

Two intrepid librarians review the best nonfiction books for children

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Determining Nonfiction Writing Styles



Today I had the pleasure of co-moderating a School Library Journal webcast with my friend, Amy Koester from The Show Me Librarian blog. The webcast focused on using nonfiction series in schools and public libraries, and we heard about new books from Scholastic, Gale, and Reference Point Press. Visit The Show Me Librarian Blog for programming ideas related to the titles mentioned in the webcast. If you missed today's webcast, you may view the archive on the SLJ site.

While Amy and I were sharing our ideas about recent trends in nonfiction series, I mentioned different nonfiction writing styles. Here's a recap of the different nonfiction writing styles discussed today.

Expository

The information is presented in a straight-forward manner. Facts are organized in paragraphs by topic. This style of writing is helpful to students doing research.




Narrative

 The information is presented as a story.


Descriptive

 The author describes the topic in great detail using rich language so that readers may picture it in their minds.


Persuasive

The author presents the information in a manner that will sway readers to think a certain way about a topic.


Poetic

The information is presented in poetic form.


This is also the perfect time to re-visit a blog post that Louise and I wrote together last year. To learn more about evaluating nonfiction, check out our blog post from January 2013: The Nonfiction Detectives' Tips for Evaluating Nonfiction.



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