The Case for Non-Fiction

by Jack Farrell

Retired Teacher and Researcher

School Board Trustee

It’s summer and you know what that means: high anxiety about the learning skills our students will lose while not in school. The tried and true formula for staving off the deterioration of academic skills is the summer reading program. Both parents and teachers support summer reading, and with any luck, so do students. All too often fiction is the default choice for doing the heavy lifting of summer reading. After all, the conventional wisdom is that any reading students perform independently advances the cause. But I would like to make the case for encouraging students to read non-fiction over the summer, especially to accelerate the acquisition of academic skills.

The best way to acquire an academic vocabulary, for instance, is through wide reading. Non-fiction writers tend to use more challenging words, and repeated exposure to difficult words in context pays rich dividends in vocabulary growth. When most young readers make the transition to non-fiction, they are invariably drawn to narratives, such as biography or autobiography, or stories that mirror fiction, such as adventure or sports stories. There are striking structural similarities between fiction and narrative non-fiction. These kinds of stories can serve as a temporary transition to expository writing, or non-narrative non-fiction. Middle and high school readers should begin to move toward expository reading. Fiction and narrative non-fiction tend to be organized chronologically. Exposition is almost always organized logically, which is a huge leap in demand for developing readers. When text is uncoupled from time sequence and is instead organized around ideas, a different part of the brain must be utilized. The higher-ordered thinking skills, such as analysis and synthesis, must be brought to bear. Comprehension itself is a challenge, and focus and concentration must be sharpened.

I would recommend that upper elementary readers begin to incorporate at least some narrative non-fiction in their summer reading. Middle school readers and above should move half their reading to non-fiction and at least a portion of that to exposition. The Mammoth Public Library is an excellent place to locate some great reads. Fully three-quarters of any library is non-fiction, arranged using the Dewey Decimal system. Unless students are on a classroom assignment, they seldom wander into the non-fiction stacks. Here are some fascinating areas: 300: Social Sciences – politics, government, law, education, folklore, folktales, and customs; 500: Natural Science and Mathematics – animals, astronomy, botany, dinosaurs, physics; 600: Technology and Applied Sciences – agriculture, pets, buildings, health; 700: The Arts – music, drawing, painting, sports.

To assert that there is a higher reading demand for non-fiction is not to imply that it is boring. Far from it! It is merely more demanding and that is certainly a good thing, if we want our students to develop their skills in preparation for the next school term. Most non-fiction writing is highly engaging, if given the chance by young readers. Here is a quick example. Lewis Thomas was the Dean of Yale Medical School, but is most famous for his keen observations about, and prose renderings of, the world of science in such books as “The Lives of a Cell [574.01],” and “The Medusa and the Snail [574.01].” Both books are subtitled “Notes of a Biology Watcher.” Here is but the briefest of excerpts from Chapter 1 of the first book: “But it is an illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.” Here is what the critic Edward O. Wilson said of Dr. Thomas: “If Montaigne had possessed a deep knowledge of twentieth-century biology, he would have been Lewis Thomas.”

Read your science fiction, your medieval fantasies, your teen romances. But save a bit of the summer for the towering prose and uncommon insights of our great expository writers.

Next time I will write more of academic vocabulary and how to build it.