Designing an Independent Non-Fiction Study: Choosing Challenging Texts and Strategies

Ideas, language, structure and knowledge demands.

Knowledge demands: it assumes background the modern reader lacks.

The core text is the main, usually book-length, text read in full; satellite texts are shorter or different texts chosen to extend, test or contrast with it.

A quick, systematic first look at a whole book (title, contents, introduction, conclusion, index) to learn its structure and main argument before close reading.

Search (scan), using the index if there is one, because the job is to find a specific target, not to understand the whole.

The deaths of seven First Nations high school students in Thunder Bay, Ontario, between 2000 and 2011, students who had left their home communities to attend high school, and the history and systems around those deaths.

The challenge the text presents, the strategy chosen, and why the strategy solves that challenge.

Informational.

Any one: title page, table of contents, introduction or preface, conclusion, index, back-cover summary.

A record kept after each chapter: one sentence for the claim, one for the best evidence, one question.

Rachel Carson, 1962.

94.

It is a yes/no question with a settled scientific answer, so it does not lead to analysis. Better: How do Arctic writers and journalists make climate change feel immediate to southern Canadian readers? It is open, arguable and narrow.

They share one form, one period and probably one editorial perspective, so they add little range. Replace two with, for example, an older text from another period and a graphic or report form by a writer from a different community.

The abstract, introduction and conclusion give the question and findings first, so the dense methods and results sections make sense when the reader reaches them. Surveying turns a hard structure into a map.

Sample: To analyse how Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, sets Indigenous teachings beside scientific explanation, and whether she presents them as competing or complementary. It names a specific thing to look for.

Each text has a different challenge (context, structure, visual meaning, vocabulary). One strategy for all wastes time on easy parts and misses the real difficulty in others.

If every text came from one nation, one region and one form, or if all were read only as accounts of harm, the study might suggest that First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples share a single experience or are defined only by suffering. Fix it by including writers from different nations and regions (for example Anishinaabe, Dene, Potawatomi, Inuit or Métis), different forms, and texts about present-day strength, science, art, law or language, not only loss.

Sample: 20 min inspectional reading (contents, introduction, conclusion, index) to locate the argument; 10 min searching the index for my key terms; 75 min studying the two chapters that matter, with a chapter log; 15 min writing a summary of the book's thesis and the evidence I will use, with page numbers. It is justified because only part of the book serves my claim, but I must understand the overall thesis so I do not quote it out of context.

Sample: the hardest dimension is structure (executive summary, many sections, tables, appendices). Strategy: read the executive summary and table of contents first, mark the sections that answer my question, study those with paraphrase notes, and read tables by checking the title, units and source before the numbers. Each step targets navigation of a complex structure.