Read Like This: A Strategy for Analyzing Literary Nonfiction

The Maryland College and Career Ready Standards (MCCRS) emphasize that you should read many different kinds of texts in school. These standards provide a good opportunity to increase the different types of texts you will encounter. Literary nonfiction is nonfiction that reads like a story and includes elements of fiction such as plot, characters and conflict. It also contains nonfiction features like dates, names of places and even statistics.

It is important to read literary nonfiction because you can learn interesting things about actual events as you experience models of good writing to help you improve your own writing skills.  In this module, you will read, analyze and answer text-dependent questions about several excerpts from a famous slave narrative called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Module Objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate the behaviors of a strategic reader.
• Analyze how the author uses text choice and figurative language to affect meaning.
• Interpret, explain and apply appropriate academic and/or domain-specific vocabulary.