Common Non-Fiction Text Features

 Captions: Help you better understand a picture or photograph  Comparisons: These sentences help you to picture something {Example: A whale shark is a little bit bigger than a school bus.}  Glossary: Helps you define words that are in the book  Graphics: Charts, graphs, or cutaways are used to help you understand what the author is trying to tell you  Illustrations/Photographs: Help you to know exactly what something looks like  Index: This is an alphabetical list of ideas that are in the book. It tells you what page the idea is on.  Labels: These help you identify a picture or a photograph and its parts  Maps: help you to understand where places are in the world  Special Print: When a word is bold, in italics, or underlined, it is an important word for you to know  Subtitles: These headings help you to know what the next section will be about  Table of Contents: Helps you identify key topics in the book in the order they are presented

Examples of Non-Fiction Text Structure

1. Problem/Solution

The author will introduce a problem and tell us how the problem could be fixed. There may be one solution to fix the problem or several different solutions mentioned. Real life example: Advertisements in magazines for products (problem-pain; solution-Tylenol)

2. Cause and Effect

The author describes something that has happened which has had an effect on or caused something else to happen. It could be a good effect or a bad effect. There may be more than one cause and there may also be more than one effect. (Many times, problem/solution and cause and effect seem like “cousins” because they can be together.) Real life example: A newspaper article about a volcano eruption which had an effect on tourism

3. Compare/Contrast

The author’s purpose is to tell you how two things are the same and how they are different by comparing them. Real life example: A bargain hunter writing on her blog about buying store-brand items and how it compares with buying name- brand items.

4. Description/List

Although this is a very common text structure, I think it’s one of the trickiest because the author throws a lot of information at the reader (or lists facts) about a certain subject. It’s up to the reader to determine what he thinks is important and sometimes even interesting enough to remember. Real life example: A soccer coach’s letter describing to parents exactly what kind of cleats to buy for their kids.

5. Time Order/Sequence

Texts are written in an order or timeline format. Real life examples: recipes, directions, events in history

Note: Sometimes the text structure isn’t so easy to distinguish. For example, the structure of the text as a whole may be Description/List (maybe about Crocodilians), but the author may devote a chapter to Compare/Contrast (Alligators vs. Crocodiles). We must be explicit about this with students.