What is Informative Writing Informative Writing for Kids

today we're going to talk about informative writing now what is informative writing informative writing is writing meant to teach the reader about topic or idea now this is bit easy to remember because the word informative actually has the word inform in it which means to officially tell someone about something or give them information which is exactly what you do in informative writing so in order to inform someone about topic you're going to need lot of facts and details here's an example of informative writing from fourth grader writing about giant pandas now we'll talk about this writing in particular more later now let's talk about some more examples of informative writing here's sally here now she's been asked to write an informative writing and she starts brainstorming some ideas she comes up with maybe i'll write about elephants and how they live i'll write about volcanoes and how they're formed and then she thinks i'll write about the egyptian pyramids or how cellphone is manufactured all four of these are great informative writing topics whoa we better get out of here now let's talk about what is not an informative writing because it can get little confusing let's say sally wants to write about elephants but she wants to write about time that she saw an elephant on vacation this is more of personal narrative than it is an informative writing though she might be giving details about elephants in the writing it's more of personal narrative instead if she was to write about elephants and where their habitat is and what they like to eat that would be an informative writing now informative writings are everywhere for all kinds of topics for example earth turtles rocks volcanoes basketball all of these are examples of informative writings these are all non-fiction but that doesn't mean that all non-fiction are informative these are all informative because they all teach about the topic with facts and details there's no opinions in these whoa let's keep going now that you've seen couple examples of informative books let's see if you can spot the informative books here these are the informative books the national geographic and the dolphins book these three are fiction books and though the survived looks like it might be an informative writing it's actually historical fiction it's about the titanic but the characters are fictional inside of it therefore the only informative writings are the national geographic and the dolphins now let's look back at that giant pandas writing from earlier let's look at the text features that an informative writing has that other writings don't have for example subtopics these three bolded topics which are in the form of questions are subtopics underneath each one of these topics you'll find answers to the questions that are posed these are called subtopics furthermore you'll find photos maps graphs etc that will tell more about the topic and this helps the reader to understand more of what the author is writing about sources sources are where the author gets their information from maybe part of the source is themselves and their experiences but authors also use different sources like here they used science website or duxters.com those are sources and this is important because if you don't write the sources at the bottom it's considered stealing the information from others it's fancy word called plagiarism and lastly if you were to read all three of these subtopic paragraphs they're full of facts and details about giant pandas these are just some of the text features that you'll find in an informative writing