A Quote by Russell Freedman

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

Russell Freedman

Quote Topics

Acquired Adult Audience Biography Calls Different History Kids Only Practice Required Skills Special Those Through Writing Writing History

Quote Author

Russell Freedman
American - Author
Born: October 11, 1929

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

Russell Freedman

There are other types of public appearances a writer does in addition to book signings and readings. Each calls for different skills. None of these skills, needless to say, are those that go into writing books.

Jane Lindskold

We should teach kids how to question. Now having said that, of course, to be a productive adult, there are certain skills that are required - reading, writing, and, in the old-fashioned days, we used to say arithmetic. Now we say mathematics.

Lawrence M. Krauss

It's true that the skills required to be a conman are the same as those required for being an actor. Though those skills are in the service of something a bit more noble with acting, I hope.

John C. Reilly

I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

Paul Di Filippo

Cartooning is completely different from other media: it is closely related to film and prose, other narrative forms, but the skills needed to realize a story are very different, and include not only drawing and writing dialogue and narration, but graphic design and the ability to depict time passing visually. It's a whole suite of skills that has to go into making a comics page, skills that are quite distinct from those that go into writing a page of prose, or making a film.

Jessica Abel

I get letters from two kinds of readers. History buffs, who love to read history and biography for fun, and then kids who want to be writers but who rarely come out and say so in their letters. You can tell by the questions they ask - How did you get your ?rst book published? How long do you spend on a book? So I guess those are the readers that I'm writing for - kids who enjoy that kind of book, because they're interested in history, in other people's lives, in what has happened in the world. I believe that they're the ones who are going to be the movers and shakers.

Russell Freedman

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

William Golding

A minimum required standard to obtain a massage license is quite a different matter from a voluntary certification evidencing higher-level skills. Licensing standards should be set at a level sufficient to assure safe practice, but low enough to avoid screening out those individuals who choose to perform basic work

Bob Benson

I don't really understand why everybody doesn't want to direct. It's an absolutely fascinating combination of skills required and puzzles set on every possible level, emotional and practical and technical. It calls upon such a wide variety of skills. I find it completely absorbing.

Hugh Laurie

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

Henry Ward Beecher

In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.

Linda Darling-Hammond

Without question, students need to practice, review, and drill skills, but they should do so only in the spirit of working toward more complex mastery of those skills. Redundant drill of skills is inherently boring and insulting to the learner, and it is one of the most effective methods for turning students off to learning.

Heidi Hayes Jacobs

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Robert Caro

It's possible I'm a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn't have any audience at all. Ultimately, I'm my audience. I'm writing stories for myself. I don't have kids of my own, and I don't hang around kids all that much. Maybe that puts me at a disadvantage.