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Minds Made for Stories: How We Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts
reviewed by Brian Kissel - October 22, 2015

Title: Minds Made for Stories: How We Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts
Author(s): Thomas Newkirk
Publisher: Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH
ISBN: 0325046956, Pages: 168, Year: 2014
Search for book at Amazon.com

A few years ago, my father-in-law handed me a copy of Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Warmth of Other Suns
with the following recommendation: “This is somewhere on my top ten list.” A recently retired lawyer and medieval scholar, my
father-in-law is one of the most prolific readers I know. He soaks up historical nonfiction like a Southerner sops up sausage gravy
with a buttermilk biscuit. So when he recommends a text, I read it.

Wilkerson’s nonfiction text traces the first and second migrations that took place between 1915 and 1970 as African Americans fled
the South and headed to cities in the North, West, and Midwest in search of less hostile, more inclusive places to live. She
describes the overt racism African American Southerners experienced in the South and the subtle, degrading covert racism they
continued to experience in the new places they now called home.

I approached Wilkerson’s book with the sole purpose of gleaning information about this period of history, an untold history missing
from the dry, sanitized high school and college textbooks of my ‘80s youth. And I began with trepidation. How could a historian
hold my attention across more than 1,000 pages? About a topic I knew nothing about? About a group of people so different from
me? About a time in history that happened before I was born? I’m not a fast reader, but I started this epic on a Monday and finished
it on Friday.

I thought of my immersive engagement with The Warmth of Other Suns as I read Thomas Newkirk’s book Minds Made for Stories:
How we Really Read and Write Informational and Persuasive Texts. In his book, Newkirk makes a compelling argument that readers
are more likely to comprehend informational and persuasive texts when stories bleed into the information and argumentation.
Readers are better positioned to remember information when authors use some of the same writing techniques that literary
authors use: distinctive voice, conflict, plot, and metaphor. This is a counterargument against the authors of Common Core State
Standards that promote informational and persuasive texts as separate, distinctive genres divorced of literary elements.

Newkirk explains how story is an innate part of our human nature and how we use stories to understand the world as it unfolds
around us. Throughout the book, he tells powerful personal stories to illustrate the importance of narrative to understand complex
information. He begins the book by describing his biologist father and his lifelong love of bugs, and then strings together snippets
of text from other biologists who write lyrically about their own love for small creatures. Later, through another powerful
example, Newkirk tells of the time he and his wife learned of her cancer diagnosis. They were given sterile, decontextualized
statistics relating to her diagnosis and prognosis. But Newkirk’s wife couldn’t find herself within those numbers. She needed
something more anecdotal, more connective. She sought stories from others challenged with the same diagnosis to make sense of
what was happening within her body. In essence, when information is presented as a dry list of facts, readers have a difficult time
staying engaged with the text. Readers yearn for the connection that stories provide.

Threaded throughout the chapters, Newkirk offers readers examples of how authors make their informational writing fascinating
reads. He most influential examples include: Michael Pollen’s introduction in his book In Defense of Food, Denise Grady’s process in
writing medical stories for the New York Times, Terence Monmaney’s explanation for a complex description of stomach bacteria
using metaphors for a piece in The New Yorker, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s description of corn sex, also in The New Yorker. These
entertaining and enlightening snippets from mentor authors parallel the important work Katie Wood Ray did when she examined
the work of children’s book authors in her landmark text, Wondrous Words (1999). Both Newkirk and Ray urge us to read texts as
writers, push us to examine the ways engaging writers play with words, and challenge us to break away from the sterile, confining

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structures that have stripped voice and interest out of the texts we ask children to read and write in school.

Newkirk’s most fascinating chapter, titled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Textbooks,” focuses on textbooks and begins with this
challenge: “In this time of raising standards, it’s appropriate to ask if the standards for writing textbooks might also be raised. In
this time of promoting ‘text complexity’ and reading ‘difficult’ texts, it might be also wise to ask if student difficulty (and
boredom) comes from poor writing” (p. 53). Newkirk then sharpens his dissecting knife and hacks away at the sins textbook
authors make to disengage young readers, including their: 1) static way of telling events in chronological order and over-simplify
themes, 2) overuse of the passive voice, 3) habit of overwhelming readers with complex domain-specific vocabulary without
providing enough description or explanation, 4) unwillingness to incorporate interesting facts or details that resonate with readers,
5) absent point of view, 6) refusal to include effective literary devices such as metaphor and analogy to better conceptualize
complex information, and 7) unwillingness to alternate sentence to create voice. When combined, all these sins coalesce in a truly
hellacious reading experience for readers.

Newkirk focuses his most pointed criticism towards the writers of the Common Core State Standards who, he believes, have a
fundamental misunderstanding (or simplistic notion) of what readers do when reading informational text. He rails against the
notion of informational reading as the act of finding and extracting information, rather than the act of feeling and connecting with
the information. Newkirk powerfully concludes, “The act of reading is an experience, in time, shaped by the writer, but profoundly
influenced by the prior knowledge, purposes, emotional responses, and acts of attention of the reader” (p. 138). He argues against
readers being bound by texts; he explains that meaning is made through social construction rather than found through isolated
cold reading.

And this takes me back to my reading of Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns. Why did my father-in-law and I connect so
strongly with her text? After all, we are not African American, we have no direct experience with this history, and neither of us
sensed a similar migratory urge to leave one place to seek freedom in another. So, what did Wilkerson do to keep us engaged in a
lengthy text that informed? She told three gripping stories about people on the move. Along the way, she gave us historical facts to
teach us why they had to leave past lives behind. And she kept us engaged because we grew to love the people. She told stories.
And as our knowledge grew, so did our hearts.

References

Ray, K. W. (1999). Wondrous words. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America's great migration. New York, NY: Vintage.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: October 22, 2015
https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 18175, Date Accessed: 6/7/2022 10:45:30 AM

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