Nonfiction Terms
Types of Nonfiction
▪ Biography: An account of a person’s life as written by another person
▪ Autobiography: A writer’s account of his or her own life
▪ Diary: A writer’s day-to-day account of his or her experiences
▪ Journal: A writer’s record of significant experiences that includes
thoughts, feelings, and impressions
▪ Essay: Brief work of nonfiction that offers an opinion on a subject
▪ Newspaper article: Brief factual account of current events
Inferences and Conclusions
▪ Judgments based on
reasoning rather than
on a direct or explicit
statements. A
conclusion based on
facts or circumstances;
understanding gained
by “reading between
the lines.”
Generalization
▪ A conclusion drawn
from specific
information that is
used to make a
broad statement
about a topic or
person.
Author’s Purpose
▪ The author’s intent either to inform or teach someone
about something, to entertain people or to persuade or
convince his/her audience to do or not do something.
Purpose
▪ Describe: To tell what something looks like, sounds like, or feels like
▪ Inform: To teach the reader
▪ Persuade: To convince a reader to believe an idea or to take a course
of action
▪ Narrate: To relate a story or to recount events
▪ Entertain: To amuse readers
Author’s Technique
▪ Methods an author uses in order to accomplish his or her purpose
▪ Includes: Style, Diction, Connotation, Denotation, Bias
Author’s Technique Continued
▪ Style: The author’s choices regarding language, sentence structure,
voice, and tone in order to communicate with the reader.
▪ Diction: An author’s choice of words, phrases, sentence structures
and figurative language, which combine to help create meaning and
tone.
▪ Connotation: The range of associations that a word or phrase
suggests in addition to its dictionary meaning.
▪ Denotation: The literal or primary meaning of a word, in contrast to
the feelings or ideas that the word suggests.
▪ Bias: The subtle presence of a positive or negative approach toward a
topic.
Connections Between Texts
▪ Basically…how do these two texts compare?
▪ Columbus
– main idea
– point of view
– Purpose
– Characters
– Setting
– problems/conflict
– Themes
de Vaca
-main idea
-point of view
-purpose
-characters
-setting
-problems/conflict
-themes
Main Idea
▪ The author’s central thought; the chief topic of a text expressed or
implied in a word or phrase; the topic sentence of a paragraph.
Summarization
▪ Capturing all of the
most important parts
of the original text
(paragraph, story,
poem), but expressing
them in a much shorter
space, and as much as
possible in the reader’s
own words.
Author’s Argument
▪ The methods an author uses to persuade the reader
▪ Includes three types of appeals:
– Emotional
– Logical
– Appeal to credibility
Emotional Appeal (Pathos)
▪ An emotional appeal is
a method of persuasion
that's designed to
create
an emotional response.
Logical Appeal (Logos)
▪ A method of persuasion based on evidence and reasoning.
▪ Types:
–
–
–
–
Analogies (comparisons)
Statistics
Examples
Facts
Appeal to Credibility (Ethos)
▪ A means of
convincing someone
of the character or
credibility of the
persuader.
Constructed Response
▪ What does “Flight’s End” mean to Kathy?
▪ What does Charlie mean by “I want beginnings”?
▪ What do each of them seem to want out of life right now?
▪ Find proof from the story to back up your answers.
There are connections between the journals
written by Columbus and de Vaca. One
connection is that both were involved with
groups of natives. However, only Columbus had
a positive connection with them.