1. Nonfiction Terms

2. 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

3. 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.”

4. Generalization ▪ A conclusion drawn from specific information that is used to make a broad statement about a topic or person.

5. 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.

6. Types of Author 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

7. Author’s Technique ▪ Methods an author uses in order to accomplish his or her purpose ▪ Includes: Style, Diction, Connotation, Denotation, Bias

8. 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.

9. Connections Between Texts ▪ Basically…how do these two texts compare? ▪ Columbusde Vaca – main idea-main idea – point of view-point of view – Purpose-purpose – Characters-characters – Setting-setting – problems/conflict-problems/conflict – Themes-themes

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Author’s Argument ▪ The methods an author uses to persuade the reader ▪ Includes three types of appeals: – Emotional – Logical – Appeal to credibility

13. Emotional Appeal (Pathos) ▪ An emotional appeal is a method of persuasion that's designed to create an emotional response.

14. Logical Appeal (Logos) ▪ A method of persuasion based on evidence and reasoning. ▪ Types: – Analogies (comparisons) – Statistics – Examples – Facts

15. Appeal to Credibility (Ethos) ▪ A means of convincing someone of the character or credibility of the persuader.

16. 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.

17. 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.