Nonfiction in Non-Book Form

Let's begin by agreeing that everyone reading or writing for I.N.K. loves books, obviously(!) During my career, many changes have taken place in the publishing industry, from big box bookstores to word processors to personal computers to digital layout and illustration. Recently all this ebook stuff started up...reflowable ebooks, book apps, subscription services, and other innovative ways to deliver "content." (Don't you just love being a content creator and/or a content consumer? Whatever!)

Anyway, I looked into a variety of options, put an o.p. title on iBooks, helped start a group blog about digital books, and spent many hours absorbing blogs/forums/webinars. One criterion is that I must have big, colorful visuals as part of my digital creations. It's fairly easy to have a text-based ebook up on Amazon et al without too much difficulty, but it's not relevant for my purposes.

If a publisher wants to do something ebookish with one of my published books, there's no additional effort on my part, probably. But if not enough is happening along that line, many authors have been seeking other options.

After looking into various alternatives and pursuing some, I've come up with these general guidelines for evaluating potential indie projects:

How long does it take to create it?

How "gettable" is it for buyers?

How robust is the marketplace?

And does it have to be a "book?"

In all the excited chatter about this or that innovation, rarely is the cost-benefit ratio mentioned. Sure you can do X, but if it takes months and/or thousands of dollars to do X, how realistic is it for a product that needs to earn its keep via actual sales? I can tell you from personal experience that merely planning an interactive book app (for example) takes eons, much less actually making it. Many of us don't have a lot of spare money or months to gamble away on this or that project that may or may not sell. Trying to learn some new miraculous tech-of-the-moment before it withers away may not be the best use of one's time. Perhaps some "old" technology may be perfectly fine and offers orders of magnitude less hassle. Not to mention that many more potential customers already have the reader or other software installed and they don't have to buy a new device, download an app, or learn a new program.

I'm not sure when the idea of getting out of the book "box" dawned on me. The question became: what am I trying to deliver...is it a book, or is it information + fun? So let's say it doesn't have to be a book or a digital book-facsimile. Then what are the possibilities: a game, a play, a song, a video, a hands-on project? Without further ado, here's one nonfiction resource that I've made:

Shown is one part of a PDF that has printable posters, an informational text selection, charts, diagrams, student response pages, plus the butterfly craft where students showcase what they've learned about Monarchs. More info is in this blog post. I have no idea how commonly available this type of hands-on educational activity may be, but based on the feedback so far, teachers and students are enjoying it. And just about anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can download a PDF and already has a printer.

Other non-book nonfiction examples
• Crazy for Similes is a book extention activity in PowerPoint format, another very common program that zillions of people have. This one is a freebie, and has been downloaded over 500 times in less than a month.

• A PDF related to my book Seeing Symmetry has a scavenger hunt, an illustration matching activity, various drawing, cutting, and folding pages, posters, and a real-world symmetry recording sheet.

• On my drawing board is a printable nutrition game related to an upcoming fall book, and nearby are piles and piles of scribbles about ideas from A to Z that I'm dying to work on, just as soon as I finish this book dummy for a publisher.

And what about that marketplace guideline? As far as I know, you can't sell PDFs on Amazon, or if you can, nobody knows about it. My stuff is too big to fit in a dinky little tablet screen (you know I love you, my iPad) and besides, have you ever tried to search for anything in the so-called iBookstore? Apple wants to sell hardware and software, but books, not so much. If they did you could search on "sea turtles" and have my sea turtle book come up, and a bunch of other relevant iBooks that don't necessarily have "sea turtles" in the title or subtitle. And, you could read an iBook on a non-Apple device/computer the way you can read a Kindle book on just about any device. Not to go on a rant, but seriously!

The marketplace that I stumbled over last year is TeachersPayTeachers. With over a million registered users, it's going great guns with just under $7 million in earnings for its sellers in the 1st quarter. The sellers are primarily teachers, who are self-publishing resources that they use in their own classrooms. It's intriguing and just plain fun to cut out all the intermediaries, sell for a lower price, and hear directly from people who are using your creations and who often make suggestions for things they need. There are other options out there for selling digital and hard goods such as Etsy, and other teacher-oriented selling sites.

The best technology in the world is useless if it's too hard for people to utilize, and without a good marketplace for people to buy and sell, nothing much happens. Who knows what the nonfiction ecosystem will look like in 5 years? I'm looking forward to watching it evolve and taking part. Oh, you're probably wondering about my sales, aren't you? It's definitely a learning curve to figure out what people will pay for. Let's put it this way...if all my items sold as well as my top sellers, I'd be a very happy author-illustrator. Just like regular ol' traditional publishing, you make what inspires you, put it out there, and hope somebody will want it!

It's Spring and Revisions Are in the Air

   The weather is warming up, the sun is shining, and we all want to be outside cleaning up our gardens and getting ready for the summer.  Only a lot of us can't!  I know at least four people who are feverishly working on revisions right now; mine arrived two weeks ago (along with a gentle hint that if I got it done in a timely fashion the book could be published a season sooner than previously thought).
   As it happened, the package arrived when a non-publishing friend was visiting.  He'd never seen an edited manuscript, so I showed him a few pages.  His eyes went wide, then he blinked a lot and said something like, "Wow, that's a lot of green ink.  I'd be really pissed off."
   I'm sure that the process I go through with a revision is similar to a lot of other writers.  I'm thinking it's a bit like grieving for a dead pet.  Various painful stages have to be weathered in order to come out on the other side.  So I explained it to him.
   First, I glance through the manuscript carefully to get a sense of what needs to be done.  I stop from time to time to read a comment in the margin.  And sometimes I do become angry.  But never at my editor.  My editors (I have three) are all very smart and knowledgeable.  I get angy at myself for not producing a perfect manuscript, one they would read and say there's nothing more to do.  Ah, wouldn't that be nice?  To write a perfect manuscript.  But that's impossible, so I get angry at myself in order to motivate myself to dig into the text and make it as good as possible.  There's a bit of the high school cheerleading emotion here, but it seems to work.  For me anyway.
   Second, I start at P. 1 and begin addressing the problems my editor has highlighted.  I was once an editor, so I always do my own editorial suggestions well before I get those from my editor (and I can be really nasty about my writing); so I add my comments/suggestions to the list.  Also, my lovely wife Alison and my agent will sometimes offrer suuggestions.
   Initially, I attack the easy stuff.  Mispellings (I am not very good at spelling) and grammar (I happen to be very creative when it comes to punctuation).  My aim here is to correct the obvious mistakes, but even more important to become comfortable again with the text (after all, it can be weeks, sometimes months since I last reread the text).  Then I go back over the manuscript to answer some of the harder questions and suggestions.  This phase often requires additional research of one sort or another.
   It's hard to say how many times I have to go over the text before I've answered all of the questions.  I can only say it is not just once or twice; maybe closer to a dozen or so times.  Eventually, I can sit back and say that I've satisfied my editor, myself, my wife and agent --  that the text is a lot better than it was when I sent in the original draft.  Am I done?  Not by a long shot.
   Here's where I enter phase Three.  I put the manuscipt aside for several days and try to forget about it.  Not an easy thing to do.  After a while, I will open the manuscript and make believe I am reading it for the very first time, with an eye to catching any repetition, any line that seems fuzzy, any idea that needs to be fleshed out a little more, any sentence that feels as if I had worked on it, etc., etc.  I want the information and the themes to be accurate and clear, but I also want the text to have a smooth, graceful flow. 
   After I finished explaining this to my friend, he said (and I think he meant this as a compliment), "And here I thought you spend most of your day reading or taking naps."  I do, of course, read a lot and I also think napping is a much underappreciated art form.  But right now I have to get back to this revision, where I'm still working through the Second phase.  With every page revised, I'm a step closer to getting out into the sunshine.                    

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and More

           of our writing lives...

 

Example #1  

The Good:  A friend/colleague of mine travels all around Massachusetts doing book talks for teachers and librarians.  She recently told me that for the past year or more, most of her favorite picture books have been nonfiction. Hands down. The quality and turn of ideas, language and illustrations have been getting better and better.

The Bad: She also said that she and her compatriots have also noticed and discussed that fiction picture books seem to be going through a dry spell. There are peaks and troughs in every genre and, for some reason, there hasn't been a lot of excitement or innovation in that category.

The Ugly:  So my friend often urges educators in her audience to use nonfiction books as read-alouds in the classroom to encourage more boys reading, and more nonfiction reading in generally, especially due to Common Core.  Yet teachers admit that when they are going to read to the class they still primarily use fiction.


Example #2

The Ugly:  Royalty checks often straggle in after March 31st.  After opening an envelope, one friend jokingly(?) wondered if he should spend his royalty to pay that month's utility bills or buy a couple tanks of gas.

The Bad:  This friend's check reflected the sales of a very well-reviewed and award-winning book.

The Good:  My friend got to write the book he wanted to write, on a subject he wanted others to read about.  His book was well reviewed.  It did win awards.  Furthermore, it clearly paid out its advance and got to the royalty stage in this time of school and library cutbacks.


Example #3

The Good:  A book I loved writing about the first desegregation case has been acquired by Bloomsbury/Walker, a house I love working for.

The Bad:  Although this is my umpteenth book and I should be used to it, the time between acceptance and publication, especially when illustration is involved, is always too long.

The Certain:  After Deborah Heligman's delightful and surprising post, I know this book will be published on a Tuesday.  And due to its subject matter, whatever year it is published, my bet is it will come out in February.  

You Write Like a Boy

I recently had occasion to look through my ninth-grade diary, where I came upon this curious notation: “English—Miss K. said I write like a boy! Thanks!” Needless to say, this entry brings up some questions:

• Why, exactly, did Miss K. think I wrote like a boy?
• Was her comment meant as a compliment or a criticism?
• When I wrote, "Thanks!" was I expressing sarcasm or pride?

I’ve thought long and hard about my English teacher’s comment. From my current perch as a journalistic, nonfiction author, I wonder if she had picked up on the fact that my writing tended to be more reportorial than emotional. Was there a dispassion in my ninth-grade writing that she pegged as “masculine”? Did I rely more heavily on verbs than adjectives and thus not write flowery prose? Or was it the content that made her draw that conclusion? I don’t know which piece of writing prompted her comment, but in those days, I know I wasn’t writing about sports. Still, perhaps the protagonist in a story I wrote was more self-confident than those of the other girls in my class. I guess it will remain a mystery.

As for the second question, I’m hoping it was more of an observation than either a compliment or criticism. To put the comment in historical context, it was written in 1969, when the second wave of feminism was in full swing. I don’t recall Miss K. being a feminist. (She was known as “Miss” K., but that was before “Ms.” became a popular option.) I asked my brother, who had her as a teacher a few years after me, but all he remembered was that she was “cute.” I remember her being relatively new to the profession, and perhaps not as nurturing or supportive as some of my more memorable instructors. Still, I’d like to give her credit for being evolved enough not to criticize me for my writing voice. So I’ll take her words as either a compliment or an observation.

Alas, to the third point, I think I really did feel proud of her assessment. In the late 1960s, men got the great jobs and had the adventures that girls like me secretly wished we could have. I never wanted to be a boy, but I did read Boy’s Life and fervently wished I could go on the escapades chronicled in that magazine. In my mind, by saying that I wrote like a boy, Miss K. was telling me she thought I was tough and adventurous. That meant I might have the stuff to pursue a worldly career beyond marriage and childrearing. So I am 99 percent sure that I was expressing pride, rather than sarcasm, when I wrote, "Thanks!"

In my quest for enlightenment about my diary entry, I pulled out my ninth-grade yearbook and looked up Miss K. Yep, now I remember her. She even signed my yearbook. Here’s what she wrote: “You certainly have the ambition and ability to go very far in life. Best of luck and success to a very intelligent girl.” Now I wonder if it was my ambition and drive that she thought were masculine. I was always pretty competitive, whether in gym or in English class. And since this was three years before Title IX started to level the playing field for women and men, ambition wasn’t exactly an accepted part of a high school girl’s DNA. 

Of course, one conclusion I could draw is that Miss K.’s comment said more about her than it did about me. Today, when gender roles are somewhat fluid and political correctness is paramount, I can’t imagine any teacher thinking, let alone telling a girl she writes like a boy, or visa versa. Though I suspect most teachers wouldn’t have voiced those thoughts in 1969, either, maybe it was an acceptable faux pas for a young woman just out of teachers’ college.

At any rate, I suspect I've spent a lot more time thinking about Miss K.'s comment now than I did when she originally made it.

Believe It or Not! (A Guest Post by David Elliott)

A guest post by my friend and colleague at Lesley University, David Elliott

As an elementary school kid, the closest I came to voluntarily reading nonfiction were the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not bubble gum cards I bought for a nickel every Saturday morning at Jackson’s Newsstand.  Even now, I can hear the satisfying crinkle of that red cellophane as I peeled it away from the pink slab of brittle gum and the slippery, sugar-dusted card beneath it. And I’ll never forget my favorite card, the one about that guy who ate a truck, bumper to bumper. Ripley’s, by the way, is still around and still connected to the malleable world of gum. Check it out. 

But when Mrs. Stevenson, my funny and terrifying sixth grade teacher, passed out the orange books that were filled with dates and names and other info lethal to the imagination about, oh-my-god, the Presidents, I felt a sudden, uncompromising urge to see the school nurse.  I was a dreamy kind of kid, one whose life at home was filled with enough cold, hard facts to last a lifetime. I craved the escape, the relief, that fiction offered.  No wonder I became an author of picture books and middle grade novels. How odd then, that in my most recent work – a poetry series illustrated by the wonderfully talented Holly Meade --On the Farm, In the Wild, In the Sea  -- many of the reviews mention the amount of real information the poems contain.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised; the inspiration for many of the poems came from the facts I learned during the many hours I spent reading about the animals. When I discovered, for example, that while a leopard has spots, a jaguar has rosettes, I knew I’d found the beginning lines of my jaguar poem. 

The jaguar’s back is flowering

with delicate rosettes
as if she’s grown a garden there...

And who knew that a female sea turtle has to reach the ripe old age of thirty before she can lay her first clutch of eggs? 

(She) swims the seven seas
for thirty years,
where she was born
then finds the beach...

With many of the poems, I found that unless I included a fact, it was nearly impossible to say anything interesting or new.  

Dear Orangutan,
Three cheers to you man of the forest
You arrived here long before us... 

Orangutan is a Malay word. It means man-of-the-forest.

The more I wrote, the more I discovered that hard fact expanded the world of my imagination. This was never more true than when writing about the prehistoric creatures featured in the forthcoming In the Past. 

I was excited about the opportunity to write the poems, partly because the idea had come during a school visit. I was standing in the cafeteria, haplessly blinking at the very, very yellow trays of macaroni and cheese, when a second grade boy came rushing up to me. “You have to do a book of poems about dinosaurs,” he panted, tugging on my sleeve. “You just have to!”  My editor agreed. (Okay, maybe she didn’t think I had to, but she liked the idea.)

When I sat down to write about dinosaurs though, I found that the only thing I could think of was that most of ‘em were big. Not a very interesting book.  But by the time I had finished with my research, I had become a kind of annoying know-it-all junior paleontologist on the subject of prehistoric fauna. I had a homemade chart of the geologic eras taped to the wall, along with a timeline of the animals I wanted to feature.  Brachytrachelopan tripped off my tongue as if it had been my first word.   And in every single poem there is a fact, though it may sometimes be hidden.  Here’s an example:

Trilobites
So many of you.
So long ago.
So much above you.
Little below.
Now you lie hidden
deep in a clock,
uncountable ticks
silenced by rock.

A nice poem. I think (if you’ll allow me to say so), but it becomes a better poem when you learn that trilobites are, in fact, the ancestors of that modern day scourge – the tick.

It has been a lucky surprise, too, to see the way the blending of fact and poem seem to fit so nicely with the language arts standards of the Common Core --“Research to Build Present Knowledge” for example, with “Craft and Structure” and/or “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas.”

 On a more personal level, I feel just as lucky that the process of writing these books has opened me to the poetic possibilities contained in a single fact.

Believe it or not, one day I may even try to write some prose non-fiction. But one thing is certain: I’m not going to eat any stinkin’ truck.

Winning the Nonfiction War

Early in my career, before Science Experiments You Can Eat was published in 1972, I contracted to write a book on how money works for a series called "Stepping Stone Books."   I had written a few books called “First Books” for Franklin Watts (now an imprint of Hachette) but this assignment was with a new publisher, Parents’  Magazine Press (which apparently no longer exists).   I entitled my book Making Sense of Money, and set about creating it.  I remember that it was a struggle. I had to educate myself in economics (not my strong suit) and actually read (plowed through) Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  I labored long and hard before I finally sent it off to my editor (now long deceased).  She returned the manuscript with a cover letter so scathing that I destroyed it (now, I wish I hadn’t) but I well remember her searing criticism: “Your manuscript shows little thought or care.  Writing for children is a serious business.  You have a lot of nerve thinking you can do this.” The returned script was covered with blue pencil.  (Daggers to the heart!)  My husband was outraged. He thought I should tell her to go do something unmentionable.  “But we need the money,” I said.

So here’s what I did: 

By return mail I wrote:

“Dear Lillian:

Thank you for your comments.  I’m sorry that I disappointed you.  I hope my next attempt comes closer to your expectations.”

I couldn't look at the script for three weeks.  Then I bit the bullet, took myself by the scruff of my neck, and forced myself to rewrite, paying close attention to every comment, conceding to her language whenever possible.  My pain and efforts paid off.  The book was published and I went on to write three more for her.  A number of other authors, more prominent than I, also worked for her in the Stepping Stone series. When I read their books I noticed that we all sounded exactly alike.  Lillian stifled each author’s voice with her heavy-handed blue pencil to create a uniform style in a multi-author series.  Clearly, she knew how to shape us up to fulfill her vision for the books. (Now, when I want an example of bad writing to show students, I use my own first paragraph of one of those books.)

That was my first clash with an editor, but not the last.  Over the years I have fought many battles for various creative aspects for my work; won some and lost some. But I don’t think I’m unique. My personal story is representative of countless editorial skirmishes many other nonfiction authors have also engaged in, initially to gain a place at the table as professionals and then later as we keep pushing the envelope to make our genre a true art form.

In 2009 an editor told me that my submission didn't meet National Education Curriculum Standards and she sent me the link so that I could read them.  My first reaction: steam came out of my ears. My book met seven out of eight standards!  My second reaction:  I can’t do this alone. I’ll bet there’s help out there from other authors.  So I founded iNK Think Tank from the wonderful and extraordinarily talented community that is this blog: a small but mighty band dedicated to bringing the books and wisdom of nonfiction authors into the classroom.

Fast forward to 2013:

The “21^st Century Children’s Nonfiction Conference”   will take place on the weekend of June 14-16 in SUNY, New Paltz.  Bender, Richardson, White  (BRW), a nonfiction book packager in the UK,  is the main corporate sponsor.  But  iNK Think Tank is also a corporate sponsor.   (How ‘bout that!)   The  conference will provide editorial coaching workshops for new authors, networking for established authors, a forum for nonfiction publishers to discuss the changes in  the marketplace, and strategies for teachers for using nonfiction in their classrooms as mandated by the CCSS.  Lionel Bender, founder of BRW, asked me to review an editorial he was preparing for “Publishing Perspectives” a British online magazine. (I’m now editing an editor; how ‘bout that!)  His editorial, published on March 25, is called“Children’s Nonfiction Publishing Comes of Age."  On the Saturday morning of the conference, I will be telling my story of the evolution of our genre, “Winning the Nonfiction War,” as the keynote speaker.  Hopefully, it will pull more recruits into our cause. Understanding the real world and the various disciplines that explain and describe it needs more than an encyclopedia (or even a wikipedia) and textbooks.  It requires many voices and a subtext of humanity.  

The name on my birth certificate is, “Vicki Linda;” it means “beautiful victory.”  Hmmmmm…..

ELEPHANT IN ROOM: WHAT’S THE FUTURE OF BOOKS?

~WILL ANY BOOKS BE MADE OUT OF PAPER FIVE OR TEN YEARS OR IS THAT JUST WISHFUL THINKING? 

~WILL QUALITY SUFFER NOW THAT EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET CAN PUBLISH UN-VETTED EBOOKS AND OTHER CONTENT ONLINE? 

~GIVEN THE LURE OF CHEAP EBOOKS, CHEAP APPS, AND FREEBIES, WILL IT BE POSSIBLE TO MAKE A LIVING AS AN AUTHOR? 

~HOW CAN ANYBODY FIND OUR BOOKS AMIDST THE DELUGE? 

~DO KIDS LEARN MORE FROM EBOOKS OR LESS?

  

~WILL OUR SACRED LIBRARIES WHISK THEMSELVES AWAY FROM PRINT? 

 

Can’t help but wonder about such things seeing as it’s our livelihood and all, so I just did some gleaning to see where things stand. With that in mind, here are three comments typical of last year’s attitudes, plus a synopsis of seven new comments that were published just yesterday.

OLD (well, sorta)

Jeremy Greenfield, editorial director of Digital Book World – In January 2012, he noted a study that produced the following results: “Given the choice between reading e-books or print books, children prefer e-books... Children who read e-books also retain and comprehend just as much as when they read print books.”  But he did notice that kids reading books with lots of bells and whistles tended to get distracted.

WIRED - In April, they said that publishers were convinced they had to evolve and were hustling to make e-books more immersive.  They hoped that multi-media experiences would be the coming thing.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York - By June, their own study partially backed up Greenfield, showing that kids who read enhanced ebooks "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story.” It seems that that all those extra features really were distracting.

 

NEW (From the Washington Post)

Multiple award winning novelist Jennifer Miller says that her latest book took 7 years to write, but awards and great reviews alone weren’t enough to get noticed.  Competing with the 60,000 titles published each year is so hard lately that if your book doesn’t sell right away you’re a goner.  So she has become a marketing strategist, an entrepreneur, and a publicist rolled into one.

Publisher David Miller says the roles of various media—books, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and journals used to be distinct and didn’t compete with each other, which was great for their bottom lines.  But now the roles are blurred, anything can morph into a book, and everyone is competing against everyone else.

Indie Bookseller Marc LaFramboise says although it’s cheap and easy to produce e-books online, hardly any of them make a dent in the market. Promos via social media play a big role, but it’s impossible to tell why some books fall flat while others soar. One good thing? It’s cheap to put once-popular OP books and backlist titles online. Another good thing? He sells those titles on his website.

Writing teacher Richard Peabody says tons of people still want to become authors, but most of them are introverts and the necessity of marketing cries out for extroverts.

 

Book reviewer Mark Athetakis prefers books made the old fashioned way.  He likes to write notes in the margins and quickly thumb through the pages to find parts of the story he missed, and you can’t do that with a Kindle.

 

Librarian Ginnie Cooper says people are using the library more than ever to get hold of genuine books, to see programs for kids, to access ebooks online, and to take out audio books and DVD’s.

Literary Agent Raphael Sagalyn thinks books from the big publishers still drive “national conversation.”  He is deluged with submissions but says the barriers to entry are higher than ever, so ebooks are a great option (though million dollar successes are very few).  He also says that with publishers it’s all about the money and the entire thrust is “Will it sell?”

Until the cloud rolled in, the publishing world had stayed pretty much the same forever. But these days we’re rushing into unknown territory at breakneck speed, never knowing for sure what’s next. Now that everyone wants open access to content for free and science is making all things possible, can we still plan ahead intelligently?  The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Teach the Controversy

Recently I was talking to a friend who teaches high school, and he mentioned that a surprising number of his students — even bright, literate, articulate students — believe in absurd conspiracies (chemtrails, secret world governments, etc.) or equally flaky pseudoscientific theories (astrology, remote viewing, healing crystals). Living, as I think most non-fiction writers do, in the reality-based world, these sorts of beliefs have always seemed amusing but not really worth much of my attention. I’m starting to wonder, however, if that’s a mistake.

Plenty of polls show that acceptance of ideas such as a 10,000-year-old earth or alien abductions are far from fringe — in many cases, they represent the majority view (at least in this country). Confronting these ideas is tricky. Most scientists, for example, refuse to debate creationists, not wanting to give them the imprimatur of legitimacy that a debate might provide. One danger of this attitude, understandable as it may be, is that the scientific perspective remains unarticulated and risks becoming just one of a smorgasbord of perspectives, no more or less legitimate than any other.

I’ve been thinking about a couple of books that take a more direct approach to this issue. Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World (1995) isn’t thought of as a book for young readers, but should be. In it Sagan addresses a range of pseudoscientific topics, including UFOs, ghosts, and channeling ancient entities. His writing is clear and accessible. Perhaps most importantly, his intent is clearly not to just debunk irrational ideas, but to express something of the beauty, elegance, and importance of a scientific understanding of the world. 

Richard Dawkin’s The Magic of Reality — How We Know What’s Really True is even more ambitious. The book, which is intended for a young audience, is organized around a series of questions: Why are there so many different kinds of animals? Why do we have night and day, winter and summer? When and how did everything begin? Each chapter starts off with some of the mythological rationales for these phenomena, then introduces the real — scientific — explanation. Dawkins acknowledges the limits of our understanding of some of these subjects, but does an excellent job of using analogy and metaphor to make potentially complex accounts understandable. It’s true that Dawkin’s high-profile atheism, which is implicit in this book, means that he’ll never be acceptable to much of the country’s educational system. That’s a shame, because he really does have a gift for explaining how the natural world works.

Now, about that blog title. I think “teaching the controversy” — shorthand for introducing intelligent design into science classrooms  while discrediting evolutionary theory — has real merit. But not in a science class. In a social sciences class, discussion of how and why so many people believe things for which there is no evidence could have real value. I’m enough of a realist to admit that there is not much chance of this becoming a widespread practice in the public schools. But as a non-fiction writer, I think there may be opportunities, when addressing a scientific topic, to acknowledge and refute some of the popular and inaccurate views on the same topic. This doesn’t have to be confrontational, though sometimes that approach may make us feel good (perhaps I should just speak for myself here).