Celebrate Nonfiction

Exploring the Joy of Nonfiction Reading and Writing

The 5 Kinds of Nonfiction

Update June 24, 2024: My thinking about nonfiction classification has evolved since I wrote this post, but I’ve decided not to delete it because there’s value in looking back at my past ideas. For my current thinking, please see the book 5 Kinds of Nonfiction as well as information on my website.

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you may remember that back in 2012 and 2013, I spent a lot of time
trying to develop a Nonfiction Family Tree. This effort to categorize and understand the various kinds of
nonfiction and the interplay among them was heavily influenced by the ideas of such nonfiction thought leaders as Marc Aronson, Myra Zarnowski, Sue Bartle, and Mary Ann Cappiello.

Eventually, I gave up on the family tree and
started to think about other ways to classify nonfiction, but in 2017 I
decided to take a fresh look at the tree analogy, and I came up with this:

The response was tremendous. Both teachers and librarians thought it was tremendously useful. But as I thought more deeply about the categories and their relationship to one another, I realized that the tree analogy wasn’t quite right. So now I’m using this visual:

Here’s how I describe the categories in what I’m now calling The 5 Kinds of Nonfiction:


Traditional
Nonfiction

At
one time, nonfiction books for children routinely included concise, straightforward expository writing—prose that explains, describes, or informs. Most books were
text heavy, with just a few scattered images decorating rather than enriching
the content and meaning. While nearly all nonfiction now includes captivating
art and dynamic design that’s integral to the presentation, some series books
continue to feature traditional straightforward text.

Browseable
Nonfiction
Thanks
to Dorling Kindersley’s innovative Eyewitness Books series, the 1990s brought
remarkable changes to traditional expository nonfiction. These beautifully
designed, lavishly illustrated books with short text blocks and extended
captions revolutionized children’s nonfiction by giving fact-loving kids a
fresh, engaging way to access information. Today, National Geographic, Time for
Kids, and the Discovery Channel are all publishing engaging books in this
category.

Narrative Nonfiction

In
the mid-1990s, children’s authors began crafting narrative nonfiction—prose
that tells a true story or conveys an experience. Narrative nonfiction appeals
to fiction lovers because it includes real characters and settings; narrative
scenes; a theme; and, ideally, a narrative arc with rising tension, a climax, and
denouement. The scenes, which give readers an intimate look at the events and
people being described, are linked by transitional text that provides
necessary background while speeding through parts of the true story that don’t
require close inspection.

Expository Literature
When
Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, school funding priorities
changed. School library budgets were slashed, and many school librarians lost
their jobs. Around the same time, the proliferation of websites made
straightforward, kid-friendly information widely available without cost, which
meant general survey books about volcanoes or whales or the Boston Tea Party
were no longer mandatory purchases for libraries.

As
nonfiction book sales to schools and libraries slumped, authors and illustrators
had to raise their game. The result has been a new breed of finely-crafted
expository literature that delights as well as informs. Besides being
meticulously researched and fully faithful to the facts, expository literature features
captivating art, dynamic design, and rich engaging language. It may also
include strong voice, innovative point of view, carefully-chosen text
structure, and purposeful text format.

Active Nonfiction

Inspired
by the maker movement, publishers have recently began creating what booksellers
call “active nonfiction”—browseable books that teach skills readers can use to
engage in an activity. It includes how-to guides, cookbooks, field guides, craft books, toy-book combinations that involve building a model, etc.

28 Responses

  1. Thank you for this, Melissa. I like the update—and will be sharing with my content-area literacy course for preservice teachers.

  5. This is great, especially for a nonfiction addict like me. I wonder if you might consider an additional branch: Interactive. Some examples include the fantastic "Ology" series published by Candlewick and a phenomenal array of nonfiction pop-up books such as The Large Hadron Collider Pop-up Book: Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Pyramids and Mummies, and the Museum in a Book series. What do you think? I'm a middle school librarian and these interactive books are among our most popular and most requested items.

  6. Hi Jody,
    Interactive books would generally fall in the Active category as would toy-book combinations. This would include most pop-up books. I'm going to clarify that in my post. Thanks for your question.

  12. And while these are the simplest way to look at nonfiction sub genres, let's not forget that authors can break these rules and mix them up! Perhaps we should put another branch for platypus titles!

  14. As students try to understand the wide world of nonfiction, I think it helps to have general categories that are easy to understand. Then, as children gradually become more sophisticated readers and thinkers, they can learn more about the nuances and exceptions.

    As in fiction, there are certainly nonfiction books that cross boundaries. Some narrative titles include activities, for instance. And some books have roughly equal amounts of narrative and expository text. How should they be classified? Where exactly is the tipping point between traditional nonfiction books and expository literature?

    But rather than add a breaks-the-rules category, I think it's more valuable to have case-by-case discussions about the various ways a particular title might be classified.

  20. Thanks, Melissa. My Picture Book Intensive group at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Children's and YA literature has been looking seriously at nonfiction and it IS hard to find the vocabulary to articulate what's going on in the fascinating picture books in our stacks. We'll be quoting from YOU at the next residency for sure.

  22. So glad this system is helpful to you, Jane. Much of the vocabulary we need is being used by educators writing academic articles. I find it helpful to try to stay abreast of their work. It's time consuming, but worth the effort.

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