Argumentative Structure v. Narrative Structure

Wed, Nov 01

When you're writing an op-ed, a research article, a brief, or a college essay, your main goals are to educate and persuade your reader. In order to effectively do that, you must establish trust, authority, and broad sense of your argument.

Conversely, when you're writing a story -- about anything -- your main goal is to keep your reader interested, which means keeping them wondering: "What next?" One must bring to life a world rich enough to convince the reader it's real (or real enough), while also holding enough information back that the reader has to keep reading to find out more.

These two modes -- the expository and the narrative -- are not mutually exclusive, but they do often work in tension. Knowing how to make that tension productive, how to make the educational bits suspenseful and the storytelling richly informative, is the key to masterful creative nonfiction.