How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor

Critical Thinking in the Age of Bias, Contested Truth, and Disinformation

Thomas C. Foster

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062895882
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.

We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We need to be more perceptive, more critical, and more judicious readers. The future of our republic may depend on it.

How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is more careful, more attentive, more aware reading. On bookstore shelves, one book looks as authoritative as the next. Online, posts and memes don't announce their relative veracity. It is up to readers to establish how accurate, how thorough, how fair material may be.

After laying out general principles of reading nonfiction, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor offers advice for specific reading strategies in various genres from histories and biographies to science and technology to social media. Throughout, the emphasis will be on understanding writers' biases, interrogating claims, analyzing arguments, remaining wary of broad assertions and easy answers, and thinking critically about the written and spoken materials readers encounter. We can become better citizens through better reading, and the time for that is now.

1

The Structure of Nonfiction Information

How We Find Out What We’re Reading

I’M GOING TO ASK you here to think like a writer for a little bit. Not what you signed up for, I know, but it will be worth it. Besides, you don’t have to actually write anything. And let’s talk here about longer-form nonfiction: magazine articles and books. The daily newspaper reporter is moving so fast that she rarely has time (or space) to concern herself with these matters. And what are we talking about? Salesmanship. Advertisements for yourself, or at least for your work. The first job of every writer on page one is to get the reader to page two, and then from two to three and so on. How do we do that?

By not sucking?

That would help. That’s why the hook, that rhetorical or narrative gambit, is there at the front, something to win readers’ goodwill and buy a little space to lay out the essentials of the work to follow. And how do writers manage that laying out of essentials? The four Ps. Like the Five Ws of journalism, but fewer and with a different letter. Not Who, What, When, Where, and Why, but Problem, Promise, Program, and Platform. Not as catchy, but no less essential. These terms come up in writing book proposals and first chapters, but they also apply in magazine articles and books. Let’s see what they mean.

• Problem: the prime cause that pushes the writer to commit this piece of nonfiction. You’re establishing need here. If your article is on new and bizarre ways to use up zucchini in season, you want to establish that zucchini overpopulation is a menace to society, so we need all the help we can in eradicating this scourge. In How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, I made the claim that a great many readers fear poetry because they believe they can’t understand it or the weird rules and terminology that accompany it. If you’re writing a biography, the problem may simply be a lack of information: here is someone you never heard of, but that’s been your loss because he’s terrific and has much to teach us. Or the problem may be that there have been dozens of biographies of this famous person from the past, but the approaches have been inadequate to the task, or this newly revealed information changes everything. The nature of the problem matters less than your sales job about its importance for readers.
• Promise: in essence, “I can fix that for you.” For the zucchini article, your promise is that these five new recipes will change readers’ lives and rock their world. Heck, their kids won’t even notice there’s zucchini in there. In Poetry, my promise was that I would take the terror out of poetry reading and actually make it fun by demystifying the form (avoiding genre, because that’s part of the mystification). And also that they wouldn’t notice the zucchini.
• Program: how the writer will achieve the promise. In the case of the magazine article, the program is the article, so next to zero space (a precious commodity) is given over to that. For the book writer, this is a big deal, how we go from promise to fulfillment. It goes, roughly, by examining this and then attaching it to that, we will achieve our aims. The historian or biographer will discuss methods and approach, the ways in which this specimen will differ from those earlier ones that, while laudable, couldn’t quite achieve what this one will. For Poetry, I said that we would work first of all on simply getting the surface meaning of a new poem, from there working on figurative language and images and all those devices that make us uneasy as beginning (or returning) readers, and then we would examine the “grammar,” the specialized set of rules by which poetry operates, by looking at a wide variety of poems from the very old to the quite new.
• Platform: your justification for stepping up on your soapbox. Who are you to tell us something new, anyway? Some people opt for expertise. In my “Like a Professor” books, I use the fact that I am, indeed, a professor with considerable experience teaching beginning literature students. A person writing a dog training book will probably allude to his forty years as a dog trainer, with numerous wins and placements to his credit. You haven’t been creating award-winning recipes for forty years? That’s okay, there are other platforms. Maybe you have talked to expert cooks, gleaned tips that you then parlayed into new takes on old recipes or entirely new ones. The dog training book author may not be an expert at all but has interviewed fifteen of them to find the commonalities among their approaches. Or you can bluff your way through: “You don’t know me from Adam, but when you taste these recipes, you’ll be glad you read the article.” Obviously, this approach has its greatest appeal on shorter pieces. It’s hard to coax someone to read four hundred pages by saying, just wait till the end.

Why, then, did I ask you to think like a writer? So you can be a better informed reader. I believe it is best to know what strategies are being employed so that you can be more fully aware of a written work’s structure. You already have a sense, when you read a first chapter, of where the book is going to go. Isn’t it better to know why you have that sense, turning it from a vague feeling into concrete knowledge? That’s what I thought.

Structural Design

WHEN WE DISCUSS FICTION, we frequently use the term narrative strategy, by which we mean the design plan wherein the writer arranges and releases information to the reader. Every writer has to have a plan, even if he claims not to have one. The plan usually comes ahead of the writing, but not always. Even so, the strategy becomes apparent in the eventual organization of that information. A writer such as William Faulkner can say that he merely trots around behind his characters with a notebook, writing down what they do and say, but a point comes in the writing process when revision and rewriting replace drafting, and it is there that the novelist isn’t trotting anywhere. Rather, he’s stuck at his desk sweating details large and small, and some of those details involve whether the narrative strategy is working as it stands or needs some rearrangement.

Something similar happens in nonfiction, too. In fact, sometimes it isn’t merely like narrative design, it is narrative design. That’s because some nonfiction is narrative in nature—some, but not all. Some is expository, some argumentative, some informational, and much a combination of one or more of these types of writing. So rather than gum up the works with a term borrowed from another genre that only sometimes applies in this one, let’s go with a more generic term, structural design. As we read a work of nonfiction, we want to notice not only what that design is, but how the writer achieves it.

As an example, let’s take two of the most successful sports books of this century, Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001) and Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (2013). At first glimpse, they might not seem to have a great deal to do with each other. One is about a horse, the other about a group of boys turning into men one stroke of the oar at a time. Stripping away the surface difference, however, we see that they share a lot of similarities. Each is a multiparty tale in which the backgrounds, successes and failures, and ambitions of the parties matter immensely to the outcome for the participants and therefore to readers’ understanding. Each story is set against the background of the era, the Great Depression and, in the latter, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. And each has a cast of hard-luck characters. Seabiscuit, jockey Red Pollard, trainer Tom Smith, and owner Charles S. Howard all struggle to overcome setbacks and personal failings. Smith, for instance, was down to one horse when Howard, on a blind recommendation, hired him to train the temperamental stallion who despite blazing speed seemed to invent ways to lose races. And Pollard, who had his own long list of races lost (and few won), was a brawler and a heavy drinker before reforming himself as part of the task of managing his difficult mount.

Those boys in the boat, eight rowers and a coxswain, came from hardscrabble backgrounds, the most severe adolescence belonging to Joe Rantz, abandoned by his father and stepmother at age twelve and left to make his way in the woods of the Northwest. Additionally, a story about rowing must focus on the coach and any other central figures. In this case the coach was Al Ulbrickson, a hugely talented rower in his own right but a frustrated coach who found his Washington Huskies always lagging behind the powerhouse University of California Golden Bears, while the seminal figure was shell-building genius George Yeoman Pocock, who doubled as a father-confessor and Zen master of the boathouse. He, too, had his own backstory of difficulties and setbacks. And looming over everything is the desperation of the Great Depression and the gathering geopolitical clouds in Europe.

In narratives of such widely varying figures, it is hardly surprising that the authors choose strategies that lean toward the kaleidoscopic, shifting from character to character and event to event with each new chapter, and sometimes even within chapters. After a scene-setting preface (Hillenbrand) or prologue (Brown)—the differences between those terms being largely one of personal preference—the authors use early chapters to introduce the key personnel and situations in their stories. Hillenbrand begins not with Seabiscuit himself but with chapters on the self-made, automobile-dealing millionaire Howard, followed by taciturn trainer Smith, and then the feisty jockey Pollard. Only once she has her human livestock safely in the stable, as it were, does she introduce the horse. For his part, Brown also devotes his first chapter to management, to Coach Ulbrickson, then gives one to the earliest days of Joe Rantz, followed by a third devoted chiefly to the enigmatic Pocock, before returning in chapter four to Rantz and his backwoods marooning. In each book, once we reach the end of the fourth chapter, the narrative die has been cast, and the telling will follow the now-established pattern.

It’s worth noting that such a structure is not inevitable, not dictated by the material. There would be other ways to organize the information. One could easily, for instance, keep the focus on the main character, whether equine or human, so that every chapter is about Seabiscuit or Joe, with other characters being relegated to second-tier importance as they elbow their way into chapters that follow a single-minded storyline. Handled this way, the books become straight biographies of single beings. Nothing innately wrong with that. In the case of Seabiscuit, the title wouldn’t even need changing. Brown, on the other hand, might have needed to rename his The Boy in the Boat and the Eight Others Who Helped Him to Glory, which is somewhat less satisfying. Or accurate. Neither, however, would be the book we have. Or anything nearly as interesting. The point is, a steady through-line narrative would significantly change the focus and the telos of the work. “Telos” comes from Greek and means “goal” or “endpoint.” In this case, think of the change in structural design effectively moving the goalposts. The actual structure has a lot of advantages for these books reaching their desired endpoints. The shifting focuses allow for development of multiple characters, while the largely single focus within chapters keeps that development from being chaotic or overly diffused.

In the case of The Boys in the Boat, the structural design has one added benefit: it avoids reader burnout. Joe’s story is sufficiently harrowing in its perils-of-Pauline details that lingering there extensively could prove gloomier than some of us could bear. Brown is wise enough to take readers up to the point of pain, then end the chapter and move on to another topic before continuing that story. This angle applies chiefly to his childhood, but since that occupies the first part of the book, which is also when people decide whether or not to continue reading, it carries outsized importance.

But what about a book with a different subject entirely, one that doesn’t rely on narrative of a group? Maybe a self-help book? I’m not sure if David Brooks’s The Road to Character (2015) exactly fits the genre, but it has to do with self-improvement. He takes as his starting point the admission that he has plenty of room to improve, declaring that “I was born with a natural disposition toward shallowness,” and calling himself “a narcissistic blowhard,” hardly surprising for a newspaper “pundit and columnist.” What he seeks, then, are examples of other people who have managed to surmount their own natural dispositions to become better versions of themselves. What sort of structural design strategy will carry his search forward and interest readers? That’s the question.

He opens the book with an introduction that states the main problem: human duality. Taking his terms from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s 1965 book, The Lonely Man of Faith, he calls these two sides “Adam I” and “Adam II.” Adam I is busy, ego-driven, successful perhaps, but self-involved. He embodies what Brooks calls “resumé virtues,” those achievement items like high grades or test scores, sales figures, professional accomplishments—not bad in themselves (taken in moderation, one supposes), but hardly expressing the whole of human possibility. Adam II, by contrast, is characterized by mastery over the self, or perhaps over the ego, and his strengths are “eulogy virtues,” things like kindness, compassion, honesty, faithfulness that we hope will be spoken of at our funerals. From there he launches into the book proper with a first chapter that elaborates on the dichotomy he has set up between the two Adams, along with plenty of examples from recent decades that indicate why we need to cultivate Adam II. What follows from that is a series of eight chapters, each focusing on one or at most two persons—the journalist and social activist Dorothy Day, President Dwight Eisenhower, General George Marshall, writers George Eliot and Samuel Johnson, and quarterbacks Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath—demonstrating the weaknesses of character that each struggled to overcome. Each chapter is a narrative in its own right that demonstrates what one might call (although Brooks does not) the Deadly Sin that held the person back or the Cardinal Virtue that helped him or her surmount the character deficit. The final chapter is both a summation and a fifteen-point recap for those who might have had difficulty gleaning the lessons from the foregoing chapters. On that, readers may be forgiven; Brooks is reticent about pushing his lessons, sometimes to the point of obscurity. In general, however, he makes his case fairly clearly. And his final list, if not absolutely necessary, will be welcomed by many readers simply for bringing his numerous conclusions together in one place.

The beauty of this book is that we need not wonder about the structural design; Brooks lays it out for us at the end of the introduction. In a section called “The Plan,” no less. Oh, if only every book were so, right? Actually, most are, if not quite as baldly stated as this one. Authors for the most part do not wish for readers to be confused or to feel lost, so if we read with just a little bit of care, we generally understand where the book is headed by the end of the introduction and completely by the conclusion of the first chapter.

Some books have a very straightforward structural design. Stephen E. Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996) follows Meriwether Lewis from birth to death in chronological order, bringing Jefferson into view only when his presence explains how Lewis became the front half of “and Clark” and what that remarkable tandem achieved. We are not surprised by such a strategy; it is the natural state of historical biography, and he or she who would tell a life in some other order will have to offer a certain amount of justification to readers. It can certainly be managed otherwise, but the writer needs a pretty compelling reason.

The point of these examples is that every writer has a plan for his or her book, and we will understand the book—and often something about the writer—better by noting that plan, by observing the strategy by which the information is delivered to readers. We’ll get back to the specifics of structure in a bit. For now, it’s enough to know that every book, every article, every column has one, even the ones that purport to have none. Chaos can be structural, right?

2

The Ecology of the Nonfiction Biosphere

Or, Who Writes What, When

LET’S SAY, STRICTLY FOR the sake of argument, that you want to read a work of nonfiction. We know that, in the real world, you may not have a lot of choice, that the purpose may be driven not by desire but by compulsion. You have a school assignment. Or a work assignment. Or a need to keep up with (or begin to have) basic knowledge in a field. Sometimes, you really don’t have a choice. But humor me and pretend that you do and that your choice is to read that item. Which can also be true even if you’re being forced to do it. You might, say, want to do well in the course or get a promotion or not look like an idiot when you speak before the school boar...