Nonfiction Reflection

My nonfiction was one of my favorite pieces to write about. My great grandfather Gabby
Hartnett is a baseball hall of famer, and I have so much knowledge on him from books I’ve read
to stories my mom and family have told me about him. I was so excited to write this piece
because it was my chance to share with the world who this man is and why he was so amazing. I
started off writing a bullet point list of things I knew about him and stories I wanted to talk
about. It was hard to narrow it down, and I had to leave one of my favorite stories out because I
couldn’t find anywhere that proved it was a fact, and not just a family story. I began just writing
whatever was coming to my mind. After a short while, I realized that it was really bad, and
decided to scratch it out and start fresh. Because of how well that didn’t work out, I decided to
do a prewrite, and I started scripting out my writing. At this point I decided I wanted to make it a
picture book so for every paragraph I tried to think of what kind of picture do I want with this
paragraph? This is when everything really started coming together. All the information I was
writing about either came from a book called “Gabby Hartnett The Life and Times of the Cubs’
Greatest Catcher” by William F. McNeil or my mom and her siblings who knew Gabby
personally. I know everything written to be fact because I would consider my mom a primary
source because she got the information straight from the man himself. I consider William F.
McNeil to be a reliable secondary source because he did his research deeply and wrote a well-
known published book about him. I feel like nonfiction would be really hard to write about if you
don’t have a primary source because you have to do your own research, and then confirm those
sources and make sure they are reliable. Another thing that was really hard were finding and
citing quotes because he had passed a long while back, and back then you didn’t have videos of
him saying specific things and he didn’t get interviewed a lot by the press. I am very proud of
this piece because it was really fun to write about and it was something I am very passionate
about and love talking to my friends about.