Lesson 7 — Activity 2: Categorizing Literature



The literature we read and the media we are exposed to provide us with information and entertainment. We sometimes classify literature in terms of these two purposes, although we can be informed and entertained at the same time. In general, literature falls into one of these two categories:

  • nonfiction — literature that tells a true story or describes something that actually happened, or literature that expresses the writer's point of view on an issue of importance.

Types of nonfiction literature include:

  • letters and journals
  • biography (someone's life story written by another person)
  • autobiography (the writer's account of his or her own life)
  • memoirs (the writer's record of experiences from his or her own life)
  • media accounts (newspapers, articles, editorials, magazines, television, or radio)
  • essays
  • speeches


The following are examples of nonfiction books:

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Eat, Pray, Love
Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog




  • fiction — literature that tells a story with imaginary characters and/or events. Fiction may be based on true stories and may seem very realistic, but it is a creation from the writer's imagination. Fiction is what we read in comic books, short stories, novels, poems, and so on.


The types of genres we find in fictional literature include:

  • classics
  • comics/graphic novels
  • crime/detective
  • suspense /thriller
  • mystery
  • fables and fairy tales
  • fantasy and adventure
  • action
  • western
  • humour
  • realistic fiction
  • science fiction
  • historical fiction




The following are examples of popular fiction books that you may have heard of (or even read!):

The Hunger Games
Twilight
The Fault in Our Stars


The easiest way to decide if a work is fiction or nonfiction is to ask, "Did this really happen?" or "Is this really happening?"

  • If the answer is "Yes," it is nonfiction.

  • If the answer is "No" (even if it could happen), it is fiction.


Writing can also be divided into two major categories by looking at how it is written:


  • Prose is the term for writing in sentences and paragraphs. Writers can be very creative in their use of language and sentence structure, but writing that is in ordinary language and format is prose. In general, most nonfiction writing is in prose, and fiction in short stories and novels is also in prose.


  • Poetry is the term used to describe writing that uses language in more imaginative, expressive ways than standard sentence structure. Poetry uses fewer words to express ideas and also involves attention to sound, rhythm, and (sometimes) rhyme. Poems are usually fictional; that is, poets most often use this poetry to express feelings and emotions rather than to relate specific facts and details about real life events.

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