ABSTRACT
As students get older, they read more and more nonfi ction texts (indeed, the National Institute for Literacy (NIL, 2007) found that “expository text is the most prevalent text structure in most middle and high school texts” and “students encounter expository text across their content-area courses”). Perhaps this prepares students for the real world. Even if you are an avid fi ction reader (as I am), you interact with many nonfi ction texts-anything from newspapers and how-to instructions, and from progress reports to the text you are currently reading. Although there are multiple types of nonfi ction texts, there are a handful of similarities that they share:
may search and seek the exact topic they are looking for (which you may have done with this book), and the authors tend to include asides throughout the book, which also renders the book less linear;
the purposes of nonfi ction are generally to provide information or to convince the reader of something;
because of the clearly embedded text structures, some students fi nd it easier to summarize nonfi ction texts;
some common categories of expository text structure are: cause/ effect, problem/solution, compare/contrast, chronological order or sequence, concept idea with examples, and proposition with support.
