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

Foster demystifies the rhetorical strategies that underpin nonfiction writing, yet his own prose reveals how these same devices can persuade readers. His book is both an exposé of rhetorical technique and a demonstration of it, illustrating that even works devoted to truth depend on persuasion. By modeling transparency, humor, and clarity, the author transforms rhetoric from a manipulative tool into a form of intellectual honesty.

From the opening line, “We live in an age of deliberate deception” (ix), Foster establishes urgency through hyperbole and direct address. His voice combines authority and accessibility, balancing ethos and pathos in the classical sense. Rhetorically, the sentence functions as both a hook and a claim, dramatizing the stakes of the book’s subject while positioning the author as a trustworthy guide through the chaos. This line foreshadows his larger argument that every nonfiction text, no matter how factual, arranges information to move readers toward a conclusion. What distinguishes ethical nonfiction from propaganda, he insists, is awareness of both the writer’s methods and one’s reactions to them.