Three Keys To Writing Nonfiction For Children

Write It Right: What does go into writing good nonfiction for children?

Many wonderful things go into good kid nonfiction: great ideas, careful research, excitement, humor, and an understanding of your audience. But most of the elements of good nonfiction can be boiled down to three key elements: focus, vitality, and appeal.

Focus can also help a writer with organization. Now many writers don’t outline before writing the article, but if you cannot outline from the FINISHED article, then you have organizational problems. A successful focus should allow you to approach the topic logically and smoothly. It should allow you to classify important things you want to include –group them — and move from one to the next logically. If you find odd things just happened to get tucked into a paragraph, making it difficult to say that paragraph is about a single thing, then you need to look closer at your organization.

A focused well-organized article should be able to be summed up in one sentence. For example, an article on the “discovery” of the North Pole might be summed up this way: “The final Peary expedition to the North Pole overcame conditions totally incompatible to human life and secured a permanent place in history.” This one sentence sums up what is found in the article––specifics about the harshness of the location, specifics about the suffering of the people, and a peek at the historical significance. With a solid three-fold structure, organization could be smooth and simple. A three-fold structure to your organization will often produce a solid nonfiction article for most magazines.

Let’s talk about that structure in today’s episode.

Listener Question of the Week

Robyn Campbell asks:

Can you explain the importance of stressed and unstressed syllables in prose picture books to help guide the rhythm. Can you explain it? (Better than I just did!)

Listen to the answer in the podcast!