AP Success - AP English Language: Fiction and Non-Fiction are Equally Important

Your literature collection should be full of fiction and

nonfiction, not one or the other.    For a lot of people,

reading has always been a bore. Throughout primary and

secondary school, we’re taught the importance of reading

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both within and outside an academic setting. While regularly

engaging with literature is undoubtedly beneficial for a

variety of reasons, this article is not intended to convince

non-readers that they should pick up a book.     Trying to

persuade an audience to do something that they have been

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subtly programmed to detest their entire life within 700 to

800 words would be too ambitious. Instead, I’m more

interested in bridging the gap between fiction readers, who

consider nonfiction to be inaccessible, and nonfiction

readers, who feel that fiction is low-brow.     For all

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students at Colgate, learning to critically engage with

literature, nonfiction and fiction is one of the hallmarks

of liberal arts education. And yet, most Colgate students

(and people at large) who read for pleasure would probably

say that they mostly, if not exclusively, read fiction

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outside of an academic setting.       Within smaller

humanities classes such as a student’s first-year seminar,

there is an expectation that every student participates.

Professors are eager to understand how you engage with a

text and how you formulate your arguments using that text.

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However, the seemingly insurmountable anxiety that comes

with constructing an argument to engage in discourse with

your classmates is enough to discourage most students from

reading dense nonfiction akin to what they read for class.

However, I would implore you to explore the possibilities

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that come with reading books such as Discipline and Punish

by Michel Foucault or Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina

Strings. Books like these not only show you the history of

social constructs but also force you to confront

preconceived notions about how these constructs influence

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our daily lives.    Reading for pleasure should be intimate.

Once you remove yourself from the high-pressure environment

that is a classroom at an exclusive university such as

Colgate, you can begin to engage with nonfiction in a way

that feels organic.     When you’re reading nonfiction for

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pleasure, the books, articles and essays you read should be

picked by you, in the same way that you would pick a novel.

By no longer confining yourself to a curated list of topics,

like you do when you’re taking a class, the learning process

becomes more investigative. You get to explore subjects in

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ways that relate to you, and there are no stakes as the

anxieties of a paper or class discussion cease to disappear.

And when you do converse with someone about what you’ve

learned from a work of nonfiction, you can be honest and

open about what you don’t understand or what you find

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compelling without worrying about the articulation of your

ideas being graded or scrutinized.     Despite what

nonfiction readers might think, reading fiction is as

important as the esoteric texts that you bloviate about to

your intellectually pompous friends. Unlike fiction readers,

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people who read nonfiction tend to see information as more

valuable when it’s presented argumentatively. Regardless of

whether this information subverts or upholds a popular idea,

most nonfiction readers would agree that essays and books

are more rhetorically effective than stories. But why?

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Ironically, the proliferation of anti-intellectualism in the

past few years is to blame for this. Unless you live under a

rock, you’ve probably seen memes about how English teachers

frequently extrapolate the significance of minor details in

efforts to start discourse amongst their students (i.e. the

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curtains being blue is a metaphor for the protagonist’s

depression). While this can occur, storytelling is

invaluable to understanding the mechanics of our

intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships within the

context of sociological phenomena.     In my senior year of

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high school, I took an English class called Radical Love in

African American Literature. After reading Audre Lorde’s

essay collection, Sister Outsider, and her semi-

autobiographical novel, Zami, I began to draw parallels

between her alienation as a black woman amongst white

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lesbians and as a lesbian amongst cisgender, heterosexual

black women both in her essays and novel. Although Lorde’s

essays in Sister Outsider directly inform her writing in

Zami, non-fiction can always be utilized when analyzing

fiction and vice versa.     Instead of framing fiction and

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nonfiction literature as dissonant in the same way that

scholars tried to argue that religion and science were for

decades, you should understand that they have a mutual

relationship and inform each other constantly. The essay and

the story are the foundation for how we learn and think.

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Without appreciating and consuming them simultaneously, it

is much harder to make sense of the complex world we live

in.