From: MQuattle at aol.com <MQuattle>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:04:27 EDT

What an interesting discussion! It seems we have been talking a lot about the power of content but another aspect of the "hidden adult" may involve structure. In other words, how we construct our stories, compose our sen tences, choose active over passive sentences, etc. The structural aspect may be most striking in cross cultural studies of children's books. For example, in USAmerica we seem to assume that children are active and action oriented and will prefer books with active, independently thinking characters (or those that get to that point), strong plots, forward movement, relatively short paragraphs, strong verbs, active sentences. This may say something about how our culture "shapes" a growing and an adult mind so that we're not even aware we've been "taught" to think or read literature in a certain way because we've picked up a certain frame almost by osmosis. As an adult, I've read children's books published in other countries (and even those published here from different eras) and thought, "Hmmm, that probably would not fly in U.S.; it 'constructs' a childhood different from what we tend to want to see here."
  Mary Quattlebaum Children's Author, Instructor, Reviewer MQuattle at aol.com website: _www.maryquattlebaum.com_ (http://www.maryquattlebaum/) blog: _www.greenhour.org/content/blog_
(http://www.greenhour.org/content/blog) (National Wildlife Federation)
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Received on Sat 25 Jul 2009 01:04:27 PM CDT