Wordy1 writes “A story by the NY Times (registration required) discusses the challenges of writing children’s books about science. While scientific accuracy is important, sometimes it can conflict with the need to make a book enticing or at least accessible. What’s more, the way scientific matters change as time and technology race on reduces the likelihood for longevity of children’s books about science. Lisa Von Drasek, a children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, points to the constant weeding out of outdated children’s science books from school library collections. She says, “You don’t want a book sitting on your shelf that says, ‘Some day, man will walk on the Moon,'”
Despite all these challenges, authors & illustrators like Peter Sis, Steve Jenkins and David Macaulay spend hours, and even years, researching the subjects of their books. So, will there ever be a children’s science book that retains popularity equivalent to, say, Charlotte’s Web?”
Do book orderers know enough to make good choices?
I’m happy to hear that some kids’ book authors care about getting the science right for kids. I’m sure that newspaper reporters and textbook writers try to get things right too — but they still get the science wrong now and then, or they write things that sound wrong even if they knew the topic very well. My point: it’s very possible that science books for kids are actually mostly right (and somewhat wrong).
My curiosity as a former science teacher and future librarian is, “Who in a library is qualified or knowledgable enough to be able to help choose quality science books for kids?” Sure you can say a book is a good read, but is it right? Who checks? Popular books, movies and TV shows that get the science wrong do a disservice to teachers who later have to try to get children to “unlearn” something they saw, heard, or read that wasn’t right.
I’ve got the same problem
This question about popular science books being enticing is actually two tiered as presented in the NYT article. On the one hand, the article looks into the difficulty of timeliness. On the other, it asks: how do you write a book that will stimulate the interest of the reader?
I write speculative fiction; timeliness is a pain in the ass. When you have qubit computers being developed along with laser driven CPUs and memory chips capable of storage at the molecular level and you put a Palm Pilot sized doohickey in somebody’s hand you pretty much have to treat it as if it were a galaxy class star ship mainframe. And you’ve got to ask yourself: what impact will this have on the rest of society? Recently I started revising my stories because of the article about electrostatic inks that react fast enough to show streaming video. I now have flexible cybersheets in place of paper documents.
As to the second issue of holding the reader’s interest that is marginally easier to pull off. My one inviolable rule of writing is: always assume the reader is a bit smarter than you are. In other words: never dumb something down because some readers might not get it; instead figure that they will and that they know enough to look it up if they don’t.
No matter how current or cutting edge your book on pop science is, if it doesn’t hold the reader’s interest it’s useless.