Non Fiction Writing: The Art of Captivation

So your teacher just assigned you an essay on a topic you are confident no one would ever be interested in reading. How can you possibly make a quality essay on a topic so boring? Let me help you out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- While many students believe that the topic of a nonfiction essay determines its quality, they (he, she, they) often fail to see what may be just as important: knowing their intended audience and how to captivate them to read on.  If the reader cannot understand the essay or the simplicity of the writing bores them, they will stop reading and move on, even if originally interested in the topic of the essay. For this reason, the choices the writer makes in diction, structure, style, etc. should be regarded with equal importance to the topic.  So, this essay will discuss how to captivate the desired audience of any nonfictional writing piece to help you get an A on this essay even with such a lifeless essay. When it comes to deciding a writing style, punctuation is often the most overlooked tool.  Yet, punctuation alone can change both meaning and feeling of a sentence. Understanding the effect on meaning is simple; it can change “A woman, without her man, is nothing” to “A woman: without her, man is nothing”. Similarly:

Changing the feeling to captivate an audience with punctuation is a little more strategic. Dashes, for example, can be used to give the reader a feeling of knowing the writer’s inside thoughts. For instance, dashes can be added to the sentence “While the Monster was a horrendous sight, he was judged solely on his appearance and not on his personality or intentions,” to make it feel more intimate: “The monster was judged solely on his appearance - granted, it was a horrendous sight - but not by his personality or intentions” (Antunez, “Frankenstein Essay”).  Here, the dashes intentionally stop the flow of the sentence to insert the writer’s thoughts.                                                                      Colons are another type of punctuation worth mentioning; they can add importance or stress to a phrase. Given the sentence “People who are oppressed have very little power; however, the ability to speak is one important capability they do have,” one can stress this ability to speak with the use of a colon: “People who are oppressed have very little power; however, they do have one important capability: the ability to speak” (Antunez, “The Power of Speech”). On the other hand, punctuation can also make reading numbers and statistics more bearable. For instance, take the sentence “Over thirty-eight million people died in World War I, sixty million people died in World War II, and unemployment reached twenty-five percent in the United States during the Great Depression.”  Compared to the sentence “Over 38 million people died in World War I, 60 million people died in World War II, and unemployment reached 25% in the United States during the Great Depression” (Antunez, “Conflicts of the Early 20th Century”), the numbers in the latter stand out more and are easier to identify than in the former.  Undoubtedly, knowing how to effectively use punctuation allows the writer to create a style that captivates his or her intended audience.

For most readers, a writer is only credible if they can quote their evidence for the reader to analyze for themselves.  Therefore, expertly inserting quotations is essential to captivating many audiences. A simple technique is using a quotation to continue the explanation, validating and stating a claim at the same time.  For example, “In the first millennium, Russia was inhabited by a large group of tribes. ‘After years of subjugation by Vikings of the north, the region’s tribes revolted and drove back the Northmen’” (Antunez, “Byzantine Influence on Russia”).  The next approach uses pieces of quotations to show specific words or phrases that support the claim. The sentence, “However, when Felix’s plan was discovered, he and his family were condemned ‘to a perpetual exile from their native country’” (Antunez, “Frankenstein Essay”) uses the phrasing of the novel to show the exact punishment Felix received.  The writer can now prove their claim while keeping the reader engaged because the reader will know the punishment that is being referred to. Now the final way of inserting a quotation has to do with punctuation, but its effectiveness is worth re-discussing. The colon is an easy way to make a claim and then insert a supporting quote: “Although Roy knew Harriet only from the train ride, he unquestionably wanted to sleep with her: ‘ Now if only he had her in bed’” (Antunez, “The Natural Essay”).  Notice how the supporting quote was introduced with a colon, while the quote itself used a colon to introduce a supporting quote. Trippy.

The last few tips are perhaps the most directly connected to the captivation of an audience.  To begin is the use of personal pronouns. Most of the time, using personal pronouns make the writing less formal but don’t take away from the proving of one’s claim.  However, sometimes the credibility of an argument is lost when claims are made as opinions instead of in statement form. For example, the sentence, “However, I personally do not believe that these tools alone would keep a person alive in a world such as the one described in Station Eleven” (Antunez, “Station Eleven Assignment”) is less convincing than “However, these tools alone would not keep a person alive in the world of Station Eleven.”  Another strategy for captivating your audience is varying sentence length to avoid beginning to sound monotonous: “For Jaja’s whole life, he has been told what to do by Papa, but in this scene, Jaja makes his own decision and Papa eventually agrees.  Change is evident” (Antunez, “The Power of Speech”). Always using short sentences will make your writing choppy while always using long sentences will bore the reader and can be a little difficult for some audiences to read. Difficulty and the reader’s level of knowledge are the final components to keep in mind.  Depending on the intended audience, it may or may not be a good idea to go into detail about a concept: “The Byzantines practiced caesaropapism, a ‘political system in which the head of the state is also the head of the church and supreme judge in religious matters’” (Antunez, “Byzantine Influence on Russia”). If this sentence is used in a piece of writing for experts in political systems, this explanation may be unnecessary and they may become unengaged.  However, if the intended audience is the general public, leaving out the definition of caesaropapism would leave many confused and unwilling to read further. Again, all about knowing the intended audience.

          

Of course, captivating the intended audience means knowing which of these tools or styles would keep them engaged. Using dashes makes the writing more informal which may not be effective when writing a report for a researcher or professor. However, using colons would give a formal tone that may turn away a younger reader who simply wants to understand the basics of a concept. This consideration should be just as important as the topic when trying to write quality non-fiction.

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Now that you know different tools for captivating your audience, it is time for you to determine who your audience is. Knowing this will make your writing, at the very least, bearable, but more likely captivating and engaging for the reader. Good luck!