I think that it’s important to think carefully about vocabulary when you’re writing a children’s book. I think a sprinkling a scattering of large words, especially when they’re specific words, precise words, the exact word that needs to be used to describe a certain phenomenon or a certain animal behavior is okay. You don’t want so many large words that children really have trouble following the text or they feel overwhelmed.
But I think in, so for example, in the book Whale Fall, I use the book, I use two really large words. I use delta proteobacteria which are specific kind of bacteria that you find at the end of the whale fall. And then the other word that I used was Oceanospirillales, which are another kind of microbe that is involved in breaking the whale down. So this book is about animals that, or all kinds of different living things that feed on a whale when it falls to the ocean floor, A gray whale, this is about a gray whale in particular might live 50 years, but when it falls to the ocean floor, it can feed and house a community of creatures for another 70 years, which is pretty incredible. This book talks about that process and all the different animals that are involved. There can be thousands of species, millions of individuals. I’ll just read you a tiny bit of this book.
When a whale dies, its massive body silently sinks down, down through the inky darkness, finally coming to rest on the soft silty sea floor for the whale, it’s the end of a 70 year life, but for a little known community of deep sea denizens, it’s a new beginning. The whale fall is a bountiful gift that can sustain life for another 50 years.
