Celebrate Nonfiction

Exploring the Joy of Nonfiction Reading and Writing

How Young Nonfiction Writers Can Dig Deep, Part 2

In
last week’s post, I provided a list of six questions that you can ask students
as they think about enriching their nonfiction writing by making personal
connections to the content. You can scroll down to read them all, but today,
I’m going to take a closer look at this question:

How can you find your
own personal meaning in the information you gather during the research
process? 

Students
may struggle to answer this question, but all it takes is a little bit of time
to stop and think. Encourage your students to review their notes, digest the
information, and think about what it means to them.

Ask
them to circle or highlight facts and ideas that they think are especially
important or interesting. Then invite them to choose one of the following
prompts and jot some thoughts in their writer’s notebook:

—The
idea this gives me . . .

—I
was surprised to learn . . .

—This
makes me think . . .

—This
is important to me because . . .

For
example, here are some notes I took for a book I’m currently writing:

“Female flesh fly lays about
twelve eggs at a time
When they hatch, female places maggots on a harlequin toad’s skin

The larvae burrow into the
toad and feed on its body. They  kill the
toad in just a few days.”

As
I read them over, I jotted the following in my writer’s notebook:

 

I
started thinking about some fun or interesting ways to share this information
with my readers. Then I made a few more notes:

 

First,
I realized that it might be possible to use a humorous voice and somehow
incorporate the word “croak,” which could have a double meaning. Then I noticed
the words “the end” and thought that perhaps I could use a narrative writing
style.

This
kind of thinking is critical to my nonfiction writing process, and it helps to
make the piece I write different from what someone else might write. 

What’s
next? I need to add a little bit of myself to the writing. I’ll talk more about
that next week.

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