Structure

David Foster’s How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is divided into seventeen numbered chapters but contains several non-numbered and brief chapters interspersed throughout the book. These unnumbered chapters tend to digress from Foster’s teaching program to tell the reader something new but unrelated, or to remind the reader of the information which came before. For example, the unnumbered chapter “Interrogating the Text” digresses from Foster’s analysis of specific genres of nonfiction literature in order to recap for the reader the many different questions they should be asking themselves as they move through a nonfiction book.

Each of the chapters of this book is titled, even if not numbered. Each title tells the reader exactly what to expect in that chapter, thus a quick glance at the table of contents placed at the beginning of Foster’s book reveals exactly how he progresses through...