Which type of text would you consult if you needed 10 facts about Amelia Earhart? You would probably look online for that kind of information. If you’re lucky, you would find a website devoted to the famous pilot, or a Wikipedia article with at least 10 facts about her life. To select the most interesting 10 facts, you might have to look for a book-length biography, such as East to Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart by Susan Butler.
What if you wanted to understand what it was like to be Amelia Earhart, though--one of just a few female pilots living through the early years of air travel? For that kind of knowledge, you would be smart to find a novel like I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn, which imagines how Earhart would describe her own life. Knowing what you need to know, in other words, can help you find the best book for the job.
Once you know the type of text you need, how can you tell when you’ve found it? If the title of a book doesn’t say that it’s a biography or a novel, would you know just by reading a few paragraphs? Each of the excerpts below appears in a text about life during the Great Depression. As you read each passage, note the style of the text and the way its facts are presented. Then decide whether the text is most likely fiction or nonfiction.
He waited until the little ones were asleep, snuggled together like puppies in the middle of the bed, and left his mother a note on the kitchen table beside a slice of cornbread and a glass of buttermilk from the icebox. She would return from the mines in less than an hour.
There was a bend in the tracks just down the valley, a place where the great loaded coal trains were forced to slow their pace. He had grown up playing on the tracks, the only open space between the shadow of the mountains and the rocky course of the river; his first chore had been to collect the pieces of coal that spilled from the cars, to help heat the house through the winter.
When he was just five and times were still good, he remembered watching his father place a penny on the tracks. He had jumped and squealed with pleasure when the great train passed, and then stared in silent awe at the flattened copper, shaped by the train and the rails into a disk the size of his fist.
He had wanted to show his little brother the magic, too, but pennies were too precious now to be wasted that way, and his father was two years gone.
Question
What kind of writing does this excerpt represent? What key features from the text helped you decide?
The Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) performed more than 150 different kinds of work, most of which consisted of manual labor, and operated in every state and territory. The young men employed by the CCC built hiking trails, roads, park and forest buildings. They constructed bridges, planted trees, and put out forest fires. CCC Camps also offered vocational training and basic education in academic subjects, such as arithmetic and grammar.
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Given the nature of the work and the inexperience of most enrollees, accidents were inevitable, so the CCC established the Division of Safety. The division directed safety, health, sanitation, fire prevention, and compensation throughout the CCC's camps. To improve safety measures and to provide information about an incident to family members in the case of serious injury or death, the division investigated accidents to determine their cause.
Question
What features of the second excerpt helped you see that it was nonfiction?
