About the difference between fiction and non-fiction, I'm afraid that my kids only understand that "stories are not real" and that "non-fiction is not a story."
So today I asked, "we know that most non-fiction doesn't have a problem and resolution, then what does it have?"
Ashley yelled out, "facts!"
"Good. What types of facts?" I asked. We ended up with this chart through a process in which I asked them to recall non-fiction books that we read, i.e.
Me: "Process is about how things happen. What books did we read this year about how something happens?" -
Kids: "From Pit to Peach Tree"
Me: "Ok, what process, what thing that happened, did that book teach us"
Kids: "How trees grow?"
Me: "Ok, so growth is one of the types of facts that's a process."
(Note: all this was focused to lead up to the skill of summarizing a non-fiction text by writing a main idea and two details.)
Hmmm... Very interesting.. You have my head spinning. The concepts and distinctions of fiction and non-fiction are confusing to me.
ReplyDeleteI thought prose, the grand-daddy of all forms of story, can be crafted in fictional and non-fictional types of literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose
I guess that's what you are teaching. It is the distinction between fiction and non-fiction and use of facts that confuse me.
For example, a newspaper story. Or a diary. Typically they are non-fictional "stories" sometimes told "about" characters, situations, and resolutions, using facts. They could be fictional, but aren't. Maybe these non-fictional stories are stories in name only? Are the facts just coincidental to these stories?
Maybe the question I have is: "what is real?" Real vs. Fact?
I do "know" that Facts are tricky things. Finding them and using them in stories usually means the sentences containing them are "premises." If so, usually there are other sentences that use the premises to make a conclusion (or sometimes a mood or an explanation). If the author writes a conclusion, etc., that "follows from" the premises, and the premises are acceptable, then we can label all those sentences an argument, and treat the conclusion as a "reason" for something else in the prose. And all stories have reasons.
Facts can be fictional or non-fictional, so the acceptability of premises is independent of "truth." This is how we can have fictional or non-fictional arguments, reasons, and stories that still make sense. In other words you can have a non-fictional form of writing that is entirely fictional, and vice-versa.
Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain wrote a lot of good stories with premises (facts and observations) mixed with some claims with a few sentences being offered as reasons for believing the "truth" of the claims. I suppose that the fictional part of the story is "supported by" facts, not about the facts themselves. Anyway, "real" can make a very good story!
Don
Don - Thanks again for responding. It is a tangled web. Non-Fiction can definitely be a story (biography, memoir, etc) as I would define a story as anything that has narative tension and narrative tension as any sequence of action that feels unsettled. Of course, settled v. unsettled is a cultural and individual construct, right? So where does that lead us?
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, I guess I'm trying to help the kids construct a distinction between narrative and expository (not fiction v. non-fiction as I said in the earlier post.)