Non-fiction and print media
Non-fiction asks to be believed, so it can be held to its own standard
- A memoir, an essay collection or a piece of long-form journalism is written to be taken as true, and everything else about the text type follows from that.
- Every technique in it is therefore doing two jobs: the usual literary job, and a credibility job. A precise number is an image and a claim to have counted. An admitted doubt is characterisation and a bid for trust.
- That doubles the evaluative questions available, which is why non-fiction suits a critical essay so well. You can ask whether a move is effective, and separately whether it is fair — and the two answers are often different.
- The strongest single move on a non-fiction text is to hold it to the standard it sets for others. A text that demands rigour of its opponents and offers you one anecdote has made a claim about evidence that it does not itself meet. Say it precisely and without indignation, because the observation is the argument.
- Begin from purpose. What is this text trying to make a reader do, think or feel, and who is the reader assumed to be — what does the writer take for granted you already believe?
Persona, and why it is the aspect that usually governs
- Persona is the version of the writer that appears in the text. It is constructed, so it can be analysed like a character, and across a whole book it is usually what everything else is organised around.
- What builds it: what the writer admits; what they claim to have witnessed; how much they hedge; and their pronouns — you puts the reader on the spot, we enrols them in a group they may not have joined, they builds an outside, and a move from they to we is 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 is speaking in a given paragraph, and what the older one is withholding.
- The judgement to make about a persona is whether it is doing argumentative work. An admitted weakness buys trust that is spent later; a hedge pre-empts an objection so the reader cannot make it themselves. Both are honest and both are tactical, and saying both is the critical response.
- Say the writer, never the author's private life. You are analysing a persona in a text, not a person you have never met.
The argument is a structure, and it can be evaluated
- The order a case is made in is as analysable as narrative sequence — and easier to judge, because an argument can be right or wrong in a way a plot cannot.
- The concession — stating the opposing view fairly and answering it — is the strongest move in persuasive prose, because it buys trust that the reversal then spends. Where it sits changes what it does: before the main argument it disarms; after it, it qualifies.
- The redefinition — a word the reader approves of, such as safety, care or progress, shown being used for something else — is usually where an essay lands its final blow.
- Evidence, and what each kind buys: a precise number sounds like an observation and is hard to dispute; an anecdote is vivid and logically weak; a named authority borrows credibility; the writer's own presence converts an argument into a report.
- Absence is evidence. The counter-case never stated, the group never quoted, the number given for one side and not the other.
- Evaluating an argument is not agreeing or disagreeing with it. The judgement is about the text: whether the move works on the reader it was built for, what it costs the writer to make it, and what it commits the essay to for the rest of its length.
Print media: the page is designed, and the design is an argument
- A print media text is written and then laid out, and the layout decides what you read first and how much of it you read.
- So the text has two structures — the order it was written in and the order it is read in, which runs by size: headline, image, pull quote, then the body, and last if at all the caption and the final column. The second structure is the one the page was designed around.
- The headline is the largest type and the only words many readers read. It is usually a subeditor's rather than the writer's, and it very often makes a sharper claim than the article supports — the gap between the two is a paragraph on its own.
- The pull quote is a promotion. Somebody chose the sentence that deserved to be read by people who read nothing else, and that choice can be compared with what the piece actually argues.
- Image and caption. Ask whether the caption is redundant (naming what the picture shows), complementary (supplying what an image cannot — a date, a number, a duration), or in tension with it.
- Placement and proportion are separable, and they can disagree. A view quoted in full and placed last, below the fold, in an institutional register has been included and buried in one action. Proportion says fair; position says otherwise — and naming that gap is the most reliable critical judgement print media offers.
- Digital and online texts run the same logic without a fold. The first screen replaces the top half; a headline written to be clicked replaces one written to be read across a room; and what is below the scroll is what used to be below the fold.
- How to write about it: describe placement precisely — position, proportion, type size — then say what it does. Then judge: what does a reader who reads only the biggest words come away believing, and is the page entitled to that?
Worked Example
A passage written for this page, from an invented essay collection, The Careful Word. Nothing here is quoted from any published writer.
I want to be fair to the council, and I have been accused of not being. So: the figures they published are correct. I have checked them twice and they are correct, and the officer who compiled them did it in her own time. I have no quarrel with a single number in that document.
My quarrel is with the sentence on page one, which says the consultation was extensive, and with the fact that I can tell you exactly how extensive it was, because I went to all four meetings. At the third, in Tokoiti, there were six of us, and two of those were the officers. I counted.
I am aware that counting the people who came to a meeting is not the same as counting the people who care. I would not raise it at all, except that the word extensive was theirs, not mine.
The statement: Persuasion is at its strongest when the writer appears to be conceding.
Task: analyse the moves, judge them, and take a position with an extent.
Step 1 — identify the concession precisely, because there are two. The first is the figures: "they are correct. I have checked them twice" — an opponent's competence granted in full, and granted with a detail that costs the writer something to have discovered. The second is subtler: "I am aware that counting the people who came to a meeting is not the same as counting the people who care." The writer states the best objection to their own evidence, before anybody else can.
Step 2 — the mechanism, and why it is not merely politeness. Each concession buys something and the purchase is visible.
- Granting the figures narrows the dispute to one word. Having agreed with everything else, the writer is entitled to be believed about "the sentence on page one", and the reader has nowhere to file the disagreement as general hostility.
- Conceding the weakness of the count removes the objection from the reader's hands. Once the writer has said it, saying it back is agreement, not refutation.
Step 3 — the evidence, and its texture. "There were six of us, and two of those were the officers. I counted." Three sentences, two numbers and a subtraction the reader performs themselves — four members of the public, and the reader arrives at the figure rather than being handed it. "I counted" is two words and does the work of a paragraph: it converts an opinion into an observation and stakes the writer's credibility on something checkable.
Step 4 — the closing move, which is a redefinition in reverse. "the word extensive was theirs, not mine." The writer does not argue that the consultation was inadequate; they hand back a word and let it fail on its own terms. The whole passage has been built so that this sentence needs no adjective.
Step 5 — the judgement, effectiveness and cost held together. It is extremely effective on the reader it was built for, and it has a price.
- The concessions are real and they are also tactical, and both are true at once. Nothing here is dishonest — the figures are granted, the weakness is named — but each admission arrives exactly where it maximises the reader's trust in the sentence after it.
- The pre-emption controls the reader. By stating the best objection first, the writer leaves a reader who still disagrees with no unoccupied position. That is persuasive strength and it is a narrowing of the reader's options, and an essay that names only the first has read half the passage.
- The writer's own evidence is the kind they are implicitly criticising. A meeting count is an anecdote — one meeting, one town, one attender. Held to the standard the passage sets for the word extensive, four people in Tokoiti is a small sample too, and the hedge in the third paragraph concedes precisely this while continuing to rely on it.
Step 6 — the position, with an extent. Agree, with the extent placed on the word "appears". The passage is at its strongest exactly where it concedes, and the concessions are real rather than staged — but their strength comes from placement, not from generosity, and the cost is that a reader is left with no unoccupied ground to disagree from. The move is honest and it is not neutral, and the passage's own evidence is weaker than the standard it holds the council to.