New answers tagged young-adult
1
If you need footnotes, you're not doing it right.
It never hurts to be redundant, especially in children's books. E.g.
Johnny was a roughneck. He did whatever jobs the driller asked him to do.
But Bill was only a roustabout. He had to do whatever work anyone asked of him.
Having a glossary provides even more redundancy, and makes it easy to look up ...
-1
I'm going to disagree with the “bad idea” answers. I'll give as the example the first book I read containing explanatory footnotes, which happens to be one of all time's best-selling German children's books, Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer. I distinctly remember my enjoyment... They worked perfectly well for me, even though – or perhaps because – I ...
-1
One possibility would be to have child characters of different ages or intellectual development in the story and have more knowledgeable kids explain things to less knowledgeable kids.
And possibly there could be a scene where an adult uses a technical term and say that the kid felt very grown up to know that the term meant ______ and put in what the term ...
3
When I was a kid, I had the Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts companion books, and I read them over and over. I didn't know a lot of the more technical terms, but I could either look them up in the dictionary, or just guess what they meant based on context. It didn't affect my enjoyment of, or engrossment in, the stories in the slightest.
I ...
11
You don’t say what age of children you want to address and I’m not sure whether your use of the young-adult tag indicates older children or if that is intended to cover your ’adult’ audience.
If you are talking about children who have a minimum 4-5 years of schooling, I’d suggest considering a glossary as a section either at the front of the back of the ...
-1
I agree with the answer by @motosubatsu, +1.
What I would add is it seems you are not really writing a children's story, which just doesn't demand very challenging concepts for them. I think you are writing a story for adults and trying to disguise it as a children's story, to slip it under the radar, or to indoctrinate children and/or adults into some POV ...
answered Nov 8 at 12:04
Amadeus-Reinstate-Monica
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18
I don't think this is the right way to go about it.
I have to say I'm not a fan of explanatory footnotes in fiction, it's far too much of an immersion breaker. In fact I'd go so far as to say they are flat-out awful and should be avoided wherever possible. It's a mental load having to go down to the foot of the page, read something that necessarily breaks ...
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