#9: Interview with Antionette Moses (Part II)

Don’t call them characters. Call them people.

Our ninth episode features the second part of the interview we had with Dr. Antoinette Moses, acclaimed author of graded readers like Jojo’s Story, John Doe and Book Boy. In this part of the interview Dr. Moses gives plenty of good advice to those who might be considering writing graded readers themselves, mostly concerning character creation and getting into the students’ skin to write about what they may find interesting and engaging.

For those of you who may be considering that possibility, here are a couple of potentially useful links. First, in Writing a Graded Reader, professor Rob Waring, author of numerous graded readers, thoroughly discusses the nature of these kind of books and how best to write them. Second, in Behind the scenes – Writing & Publishing Graded Readers, Nicola Prentis gives an account of the writing and publishing of a graded reader from the point of view of the teacher turned author. Her insights and narration in her post are as good as her LLL-Award-winner “The Tomorrow Mirror”.

Next Monday evening we will be interviewing editor and adapter Nick Bullard for our tenth episode, so please send us all those questions you always wanted to ask to a graded-reader editor and/or adapter but were afraid to ask and we’ll ask for you.

Happy reading to everyone!

Episode #9