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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is being discussed in Chapter 10, "From the Inside Out," when Foster says that the "form and tone of the essay must fit the writer like a suit" (144)?

2. In Chapter 11, "Life from the Inside," what does Foster call the "most famous" African American autobiography (171)?

3. In Chapter 15, "Reading Internet Sources," Foster cites Wikipedia as the source of his information about the development of the internet. What might we reasonably call his use of Wikipedia as a source?

4. In Chapter 10, "From the Inside Out," what important characteristic of the essay does Foster point out?

5. In Chapter 15, "Reading Internet Sources," what does Foster say a subreddit is?

Short Essay Questions

1. Explain why, in Chapter 11, "Life from the Inside," Foster says that the narrators of nonfiction can be just as unreliable as the narrators of fiction.

2. In Chapter 13, "On the Stump," what concern does Foster say that other journalists have about Wolff's work?

3. In Chapter 14, "The Universe of Ideas/Ideas of the Universe," what does Foster say motivates antiscientific beliefs?

4. In "Interrogating the Text," where does Foster suggest that readers focus their interrogative effort, and why?

5. In Chapter 12, "That Is So Last Year," what difference does Foster explain between primary and secondary sources?

6. In Chapter 13, "On the Stump," what are the three categories that Foster says outsider exposés fall into, and why does he say that they are more reliable than insider's writings?

7. In Chapter 12, "That Is So Last Year," what change in "fashion" does Foster say that the publishing of history has followed in the past decades?

8. In Chapter 10, "From the Inside Out," why does Foster say that the process newspapers follow to assure balanced treatment in opinion pieces creates a false dichotomy?

9. In Chapter 15, "Reading Internet Sources," what does Foster propose as a solution to inaccuracies on the web?

10. In Chapter 9, "Living the News," what two main types of subjective nonfiction does Foster define, and what four categories does he break these main types into?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In Chapter 16, "Social (Media) Disease," Foster discusses clickbait and its tendency to inflate reader expectations. Consider how titles and subtitles used in print books and magazines are similar to and different from the use of titles as online clickbait. Write an essay that compares and contrasts these two uses of titles.

Essay Topic 2

In Chapter 2, "The Ecology of the Nonfiction Biosphere," Foster makes a number of claims about the importance of newspapers. Do you agree, disagree, or agree with qualifications?

Essay Topic 3

Choose a passage of one of Hunter S. Thompson's essays to analyze. Explain the techniques Thompson uses that are more commonly associated with fiction than with nonfiction, and explain the relationship between your observations and Foster's remarks about Thompson's writing in Chapter 9, "Living the News."

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