Non-fiction and print media
Non-fiction asks to be believed
- A non-fiction text — a memoir, a book of essays, a long-form article — is written to be taken as true. Everything else about it follows from that.
- So every technique in it is doing two jobs at once: the usual literary job, and a credibility job. A precise number is an image and a claim to have counted. An admission of doubt is characterisation and a bid for your trust.
- Purpose comes first, before any language feature. Ask what this text is trying to make a reader do, think or feel, and who that reader is assumed to be — what the writer takes for granted you already believe.
- Then explain every feature as a means to that purpose. A metaphor in a persuasive essay is not decoration; it is an argumentative move, and it can be shown to be doing work.
The writer on the page is a construction
- Persona is the version of themselves a writer puts into a text. It is built, and it can be analysed like a character — which is the aspect that most often governs a whole-text essay on non-fiction.
- What builds it:
- What the writer admits. A conceded weakness early on buys trust that gets spent later.
- What they claim to have witnessed — I stood there and counted is a different authority from studies show.
- How much they hedge. Perhaps, it may be that and I could be wrong are calibration, and a writer who never uses them is making a choice.
- Pronouns. You puts the reader on the spot. We includes the writer in a group — ask who is inside it and whether the reader agreed to join. They builds an outside. A writer who moves from they to we has performed a manoeuvre.
- In a memoir there are two selves, and the gap between them is the text's main resource: the younger self who did not know, and the older writer choosing what to tell you and when. Ask which one is speaking in any given paragraph.
- Say the writer and not the author's private life. You are analysing the persona in the text, not a person you have never met.
The argument has a structure, and it is analysable
- The order a case is made in is as analysable as narrative sequence, and structure questions on non-fiction are frequently the easiest ones on the paper.
- Openings. A non-fiction text usually opens on a scene, a number or a question, and each commits it to something different.
- The concession — stating the opposing view fairly and then answering it — is the strongest move in persuasive writing, because it buys trust the reversal then spends. Look for of course, admittedly, and they are right.
- Where it sits changes what it does. Before the main argument it disarms; after it, it qualifies.
- The redefinition — taking a word the reader approves of, such as safety, care or progress, and showing it being used for something else — is usually where an essay lands its final blow.
- Evidence, and the work it does. Ask not whether there is evidence but what kind and what it buys: a precise number sounds like an observation and is hard to dispute; an anecdote is vivid and logically weak; a named authority borrows someone else's credibility; the writer's own presence converts an argument into a report.
- What a text does not include is evidence too — the counter-case it never states, the group whose view is never quoted.
Print media: the page is part of the text
- A print media text is written and then laid out, and the layout is a set of choices about what you read first and how much of it you read. Analyse it and you are analysing something almost nobody in the exam room writes about.
- The headline is the largest words on the page and the only ones many readers read. It is usually written by a subeditor rather than the reporter, and it very often makes a sharper claim than the article supports — the gap between the two is a paragraph on its own.
- The standfirst — the italic line under the headline — is where the article's angle is declared, and it usually names the writer as a witness.
- The pull quote — a sentence lifted out of the body and set in large type — is a promotion. Somebody chose which sentence deserved to be read by people who read nothing else, and that choice can be compared with what the article actually argues.
- Image and caption. The relationship between them is the whole point.
- Redundant — the caption names what the picture shows, so half the space says one thing.
- Complementary — the caption supplies what the image cannot: a date, a number, a name. A photograph cannot show a statistic.
- Tension — the two pull against each other, and the reader resolves the gap themselves.
- Placement and proportion. What is above the fold; what gets the top half of the page; how much space the opposing view is given and where it is put; what sits next to what. A view given four hundred words in the last column has been included and buried in one action.
- How to write about it. Describe the placement precisely — position, proportion, type size — then say what it does to a reader. The most useful question is: what does someone who reads only the biggest words on this page come away believing? That is most readers, and the page was designed knowing it.
Worked Example
A feature page written for this page, from an invented regional newspaper. Nothing here is reproduced from a real publication.
Page 3, Saturday edition.
Headline, across all five columns, 60 point: THE HOSPITAL THAT ISN'T THERE
Standfirst, italic: Waimai's after-hours clinic closed in March. Alice Ropata drove the road that replaced it.
Photograph, filling the top right of the page: a wet highway at night, shot through a windscreen. No people in it.
Caption, 8 point: State Highway 4 north of Waimai. The nearest emergency department is 71 minutes away in good weather.
Pull quote, centre column, 24 point: "You learn the corners."
Below the fold, final four paragraphs: the district health board's written statement, quoted in full — 180 words beginning A comprehensive review of service configuration has been undertaken…
The question: Analyse how the writer positioned you to take a side.
Step 1 — read the page in the order a reader actually reads it, not the order it was written. Largest type first: headline, then photograph, then pull quote, then the standfirst, then the body, and last — if at all — the caption and the statement.
Step 2 — the headline claims more than the article can. "THE HOSPITAL THAT ISN'T THERE" states an absence as a fact. There is a hospital; it is seventy-one minutes away. The headline converts a distance into a non-existence, and it does it in the largest words on the page, where no qualification is possible.
Step 3 — the photograph leaves a space for the reader. It is shot through a windscreen, so the reader is placed in the driver's seat, and it contains no people, so there is nobody in the frame to be sympathetic towards instead. A photograph with nobody in it is not empty; it is reserved.
Step 4 — the only number is in the smallest type. "71 minutes away in good weather" is the single checkable fact on the page and it sits in 8-point caption text under a picture. The relationship is complementary: the photograph cannot show a duration, so the caption supplies what the image lacks — and the qualifier "in good weather" does more work than the number, because it invites the reader to imagine the other kind.
Step 5 — the pull quote is a promotion. "You learn the corners" is four words with no argument in them, lifted out and set at 24 point. Somebody decided this was the sentence for people who read nothing else. It works because it is understated: it implies a driver has made the trip often enough to have learnt it, and the reader does the arithmetic themselves.
Step 6 — the opposing view is included and buried in the same action. The board's statement gets 180 words, which looks generous, and it gets them below the fold, last, in a register nobody reads voluntarily: "A comprehensive review of service configuration has been undertaken." Placed at the top it would frame the article. Placed last it reads as the answer the article has already dealt with. Proportion says fair; position says otherwise.