Determining Quality through Audience, Genre, and the Rhetorical Canon: Imagining a Biography of Eudora Welty for Children

While numerous studies on academic writers composing for non-academic audiences exist, few if any studies address academic writers composing biographies for children. This self-reflective case study of a Eudora Welty biography for children provides insight into how an academic writer can effectively write in a specific genre (biography) for a specific audience (children) and into practical rhetorical choices such as choosing photographs and designing page layouts. The study also offers triangulated data regarding essential criteria of quality children’s literature as identified by experts in the field (editors, publishers, award committee members, scholars, and authors). The author’s findings include sixty-eight of the most often cited criteria, such as accuracy and the use of documented evidence, that serve as guidelines and a means of evaluating biographies written for children