What is Non-Fiction?

About the lecture

In this module, we explore types of non-fictions texts, focusing in particular on: (i) everyday non-fiction texts such as newspaper articles, menus, recipes, instructions, prescriptions, shopping lists and road signs; (ii) the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts; (iii) the structure of everyday non-fiction texts; (iv) longer non-fiction text types found in the news, such as news reports, obituaries, reviews, commentaries/editorials, self-help and health columns; and (v) other types of non-fiction that are sometimes referred to as literary non-fiction, including biographies and autobiographies, travel writing, medical and scientific writing, and essays.

About the lecturer

Guyanne Wilson is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics and University College London. Her research interests are in World Englishes and their grammatical variations, normative orientations in World Englishes, English in Africa and the Caribbean, World Englishes in diaspora, World Englishes on social media, and corpus linguistics. She is the author of The Sociolinguistics of Singing: Dialect and Style in Choral Singing in Trinidad (2014), and is working on a new book, Language ideologies and identities on Facebook and Tiktok: A Southern Caribbean perspective.