How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between

Introduction

Why Critical Reading Matters

I SAID IN THE preface that we live in an age of deliberate deception. But we also live in what may be a golden age of nonfiction. The one statement being true doesn’t make the other false; both conditions can obtain simultaneously. There will be time enough to document the range and quality of contemporary writing about the real world, so for now, let’s simply say that there is a vast array of very good and even much great nonfiction writing. Which is why I also suggested that we need to be able to separate the sheep from the goats in the books and articles we read. In other words, we need to read critically, or more critically than we currently do. First, though, let’s consider the nature of nonfiction and what it might mean to read critically.

Ever since I began thinking about this project, a question has dogged my steps, because I knew someone would ask: when a book has been written on a subject, why is there a second one? Why are there hundreds of books and articles on the Battle of the Little Bighorn rather than just one? Why, after the definitive biography of, say, Abraham Lincoln (and there have been several so deemed) do biographies keep coming? We know that the feted one is definitive; every review will have told us so. Their appearance suggests that perhaps the Big Bio did less defining than some of us thought. So why do they exist? Because at some point, human beings are involved: in the life or event or turmoil being discussed, as well as in the writing of said discussion and in the evaluation of that writing.

We can never know the innermost thoughts of another person. Heck, we barely know our own. In the case of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, there were three persons we would most want to hear from. The most celebrated of the three, based on bookshelves and the history of movies and television shows, George Armstrong Custer, was unavailable to file an after-action report. All we can know of General Custer’s thoughts is whatever he shared with others before the battle, and history tells us that most of those thoughts were wrong. So, what about the native leaders, Lakota chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse? Sitting Bull was a holy man, a visionary, rather than a battle chief. He was not present at the battle, although he said his dreams depicted the manner of Custer’s downfall and gave the war leaders a strategy to follow. Crazy Horse, who was a battle chief and is generally credited with leadership in the victory, went on the run for most of the following year. When he finally surrendered, in May 1877, he probably sealed his fate, which was to be killed four months later. So details of who decided on what course of action and why are a little thin.

And there, Dear Reader, is why we need the second book. And the third, the fourth, the two hundred and seventy-first. Nobody gets it all correct and complete. Space is limited, information nearly the opposite. What one leaves in or out is a subjective matter more than an editorial one. Maybe, just maybe, one person’s bias will cancel out an earlier one’s, or more complete knowledge will fill in gaps in earlier versions, and we can eventually get closer to something resembling objective truth. Which we can never achieve.

A friend of mine, upon hearing of this project, said, When I got to college, I believed that nonfiction meant that the thing was true. Ah, we were so naive then. Well, why wouldn’t she? The nonfiction writing that she—and you and I and pretty much everyone everywhere—encountered most often growing up was the textbook. And if we can’t count on textbooks, whose contents we are tasked with absorbing and then handing back on tests, to be true, then where are we? Nowhere, that’s where. We count on the explanations for an algebraic equation or the date of a battle to be accurate, that chlorine and sodium will indeed react in a certain way, that amphibians do indeed live their early lives where chapter three says they do. Otherwise, all is lost. We learn to trust our textbooks, if for no other reason than we need to pass the upcoming test. That strategy serves us well during our school days, but it doesn’t necessarily translate well to the world of general nonfiction, where we might be best served by President Ronald Reagan’s policy when dealing with the Soviet Union, Trust, but verify. In some cases, just verify. Trust be damned.

Let’s suppose that the worst thing you can do when reading nonfiction is to believe that everything you read is true. What’s the second worst? Not believing any of it. One of the things my friend, now a professional in the world of books and publishing, learned along the way was that not every work of nonfiction can be relied on to deliver the truth, the whole truth, and that other part. One possible outcome of such a revelation is cynicism; having had our eye blackened once, we believe that every outstretched hand will clench and punch us. That every book is either false or manipulative. That there is no truth to be found. But you know what? That jaded attitude is useless. Its logical endpoint is to dispense with reading altogether. For one thing, if we decide this about printed matter, is it possible to draw any other inference regarding mass media sources, news programs and news magazines and documentaries and all the rest? To say nothing of online sources, for heaven’s sake. And then where are we? Stuck with novels, I suppose. At least we expect those to jerk us around in the service of art and entertainment. It would be a boon to fiction writers, who can use all the help they can get nowadays, but not that helpful for transmitting information. What we really need is not a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the whole nonfiction enterprise but rather a means of navigating those tricky waters so that we don’t capsize or pitch up on the rocks.

Being able to rely upon what we read is critical in many ways. Before the advent of the YouTube how-to video, most of us learned to do things from instructional books and articles. From those sources you could learn everything from throwing a discus to making household repairs to rebuilding car engines to mastering the art of French cooking, as promised by the late Julia Child and her coauthors. Say, that might be a good book title. And if you can learn to make Coulis de Tomates à la Provençale from a book, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be learned there.

Beyond how-to instruction, there is a tremendous range of knowledge we rely on nonfiction to provide. We count on journalism, particularly local newspapers, to keep civic leaders and institutions in check. When corruption—sweetheart deals in exchange for favorable policies, money for votes, campaign contributions for deep-sixing regulatory rules—at city hall or the statehouse is uncovered, who uncovers it? Damn straight. When the holder of the highest office in the land hired a bunch of thugs in an attempt to subvert an election he was basically guaranteed to win anyway, who uncovered that vicious attack on our democratic institutions, who dug down to the truth despite threats and lies at every step? Two reporters from a local newspaper. Oh, sure, we think of the Washington Post as a major national paper and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as stars in the journalistic firmament, but before Watergate they were just two young, and not very highly regarded, reporters at a local paper—whose locale just happened to contain the White House. The ability of journalists to investigate governmental wrongdoing rests on a foundation of trust: we have to be able to trust that they are giving the news to us straight, all truth and no fantasy, and they have to earn that trust with every story they write, every article they publish. That is why newspapers and magazines have traditionally insisted on multiple sources for facts in articles; the more explosive the story, the greater the need for solid facts. And it is why they are quick to admit mistakes and issue corrections. No human endeavor can be perfect, but for journalism to matter, it must come mighty close.

Nor is it just governmental wrongdoing that we count on The Daily Herald-Star-Examiner to apprise us of. Who broke open the story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church? The Boston Globe, specifically a team called Spotlight, investigative reporters working together on stories of sufficient scope that they take months to uncover and publish. When they were finished, their list of pedophile priests had grown from one to thirteen to eighty-seven, just in greater Boston. Numerous priests were removed from clerical duty, several were tried and convicted of abuse of minors, lawsuits were filed against the Archdiocese, and Cardinal Bernard Law, who had overseen the cover-ups for years, was forced by the weight of public opinion to resign his position. Throughout the process, the Spotlight team had to fight church and city red tape to open sealed documents and unearth carefully hidden evidence, while also fending off community resistance to the truth being revealed. It was attacked for making up stories or trading in false tales peddled by disturbed individuals. Yet they persisted, and their efforts were rewarded with the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. And that, friends, is what journalism can do and why we need courageous nonfiction.

I recently read an article that reported the death of local newspapers—a process that has been going on for years—will mean that fewer instances of official malfeasance will be uncovered, which will be a national calamity. And so it will.

Every week brings us new reasons that we need professional journalists and investigative freelancers. The latest as I write is the misbehavior by Boeing in hiding the defects in its 737 MAX 8 jet, which caused two disastrous crashes in 2018 and 2019, one in Indonesia and the second in Ethiopia. The previous year, it was the horrific stories of Dr. Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of girls and young women, mostly athletes, under the guise of treatment as a team doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University. Before that, it was the Flint water crisis, a series of bad decisions and shoddy processes that led to terrible water for residents of the city and lead poisoning for its children. That human-caused disaster also, however, involved the heroic efforts of a committed physician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, to reveal the problem despite efforts to discredit her by state and local officials. Dr. Hanna-Attisha later augmented the reporting on the crisis with her own 2019 book, What the Eyes Don’t See. With all of these stories, the common thread is that none of the institutions involved willingly shared information about criminality or malfeasance. Reporters (and their lawyers) have to take journalistic sledgehammers to the stonewalling by companies and educational institutions and governments, because no entity cheerfully gives up incriminating evidence. This process of prying the information loose from unwilling hands is expensive, time-consuming, and not for the faint of heart.

The business of nonfiction, however, is not all gloom and doom. It can inspire, as did The Boys in the Boat, about the 1936 University of Washington rowing team that won the premier event and spoiled Hitler’s Olympics narrative as much as their brethren on the track, or Seabiscuit, about a cast-off horse, cast-off trainer, and cast-off jockey who came together to create the Thoroughbred sensation of the Great Depression. It can entertain and amuse, as do David Sedaris’s autobiographical essay-memoirs. It can pull back the curtain on moviemaking or rock and roll stardom, reveal the depths to which the human mind can sink or the heights to which it can ascend, unravel the mysteries of the universe or the inexplicable behavior of social organizations, explain the inner workings of the atom or the structure of ancient civilizations, expose horrific crimes from last week or a thousand years ago. In other words, it can offer us almost any knowledge the world has to offer. That’s all swell. It’s just that . . .

. . . we can’t always trust what nonfiction itself offers.

The same form that can unmask a hoax can also perpetrate one. And has, with some regularity. If it can illuminate the workings of disease and its treatment, it can also be used to promote quackery and distract sufferers from legitimate information. It has equal facility to expose the sins of industry and to hide them or recast them as virtues. And here’s the real problem: if we only read surfaces, we won’t be able to tell the difference between the righteous and the right-around-the-bend.

There’s a solution here: we can learn to read past the surface. To discern motive, to evaluate evidence, to analyze arguments, to avoid being hoodwinked. Such a reading program can give us greater appreciation of valid, and valuable, nonfiction while helping us to sweep the chaff away from the wheat.

I say it’s high time we got started. How about you?

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,