Literary nonfiction, personal essay, memoir, and narrative rhetoric — how literary techniques serve persuasive purposes.
Understanding how essays, memoirs, and personal narratives function rhetorically — making arguments through story rather than through explicit claims.
The genre conventions of personal essay and memoir — the relationship between the writer's self, the narrative, and the implicit argument embedded in the telling.
Scene-setting, characterization, dialogue, pacing, and the use of specific detail — how narrative craft in nonfiction creates persuasive and emotional effect.
Distinguishing the author from the narrator; understanding how narrative distance, retrospective reflection, and selective disclosure shape meaning and argument.
How literary nonfiction argues through showing rather than telling — identifying the embedded argument, universal claim, or implicit thesis of a narrative text.
How formal choices — the braided essay, lyric essay, flash nonfiction, in medias res openings — generate rhetorical effects beyond what content alone can achieve.
Literary nonfiction has a rhetorical situation just like any persuasive text — a writer, a purpose, an audience, and a context. Unit 7 applies RHS to texts that argue through story, requiring readers to identify purpose and audience even when they are not stated explicitly.
In literary nonfiction, style choices — diction, syntax, figurative language, scene vs. summary — are not decorative. They are the argument. STL in Unit 7 means analyzing how a memoirist's word choice or an essayist's sentence rhythm produces the text's persuasive effect.
CLE in Unit 7 focuses on the structural and linguistic choices that distinguish excellent literary nonfiction: how an essayist organizes a braided narrative, how a memoirist uses dialogue to dramatize rather than summarize, how white space and compression create meaning.