Skip to main content
Common Core ELAGrades 11–12Reading: Informational

RI.11-12.10: Reading Complex Literary Nonfiction

Also written as CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.10 · Cluster: Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity.

All 41 Grades 11–12 ELA Standards

The Official Wording

By the end of grade 11, read and comprehend literary nonfiction in the grades 11-CCR text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. By the end of grade 12, read and comprehend literary nonfiction at the high end of the grades 11-CCR text complexity band independently and proficiently.

Common Core State Standards, Grades 11-12, Reading: Informational Text · Read it at the source · Checked October 14, 2026

What RI.11-12.10 Means in Plain English

Juniors and seniors read literary nonfiction, essays, memoirs and speeches, at the top of the high school range: long sentences, held-back claims, irony that never announces itself. An essay about Agloe, a fake town that mapmakers invented and a real store later made true, tests all three.

Ninth and tenth grade (RI.9-10.10) built independence in the grades 9-10 band. Grade 11 still gets support on the hardest texts, and by the end of grade 12 students read them alone. This is the last band of the line, the level called college and career ready.

RI.11-12.10 I Can Statements

  • I can follow a long sentence to its main clause.
  • I can state a claim the author implies but never states.
  • I can read a demanding essay on my own and explain it.

RI.11-12.10 Worked Example

The essay holds its claim back until the last two sentences and leans on irony, and the weak answer retells the anecdote without reaching either.

Read the Story
In the 1930s, two mapmakers at the General Drafting Company, Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, scrambled their initials into a name, Agloe, and set it down at a dirt-road crossing in the Catskills where no town had ever stood.The town was a trap: if Agloe turned up on a rival’s map, the rival had copied theirs, since no surveyor walking that empty crossroads could have found it.What the mapmakers did not foresee, because no one who draws a map quite believes the map can draw back, was that someone would trust the paper over the ground: years later, a general store opened at that crossing, and its owners, reading the maps, named it the Agloe General Store.So the lie became a place, and the place, for a time, made the lie true, which is perhaps less a story about maps than about us, who will build a store where we are told a town should be.We like to think that maps record the world. Sometimes the world, obligingly, records the map.
A short passage written for this page.
Question: Read the passage on your own first. What is the author’s central claim, and how does the long third sentence help build it?
Not Yet“Two mapmakers made up a fake town called Agloe to catch people copying their map. Later someone built a store there and called it Agloe. The author thinks this is a funny story.”The anecdote is retold accurately, but the reading stops at the plot. It misses the claim in the last two sentences, that people reshape the world to fit their maps, and skips the long sentence that sets it up.
Meets the Standard“The author’s claim is that maps do more than record the world: people trust them enough that the world comes to match them. The long third sentence builds this. Its main clause is ‘What the mapmakers did not foresee … was that someone would trust the paper over the ground,’ and the clause tucked inside it, ‘no one who draws a map quite believes the map can draw back,’ plants the reversal before the store appears. The ending turns that reversal into a pattern about us, people ‘who will build a store where we are told a town should be,’ and the final sentence flips the essay’s opening assumption: the world ‘records the map.’ The tone is amused, but the point is serious, since a fiction repeated with authority can become fact.”It finds the implied claim, untangles the long sentence by locating its main clause and the clause embedded in it, and reads the closing reversal and the tone as part of the argument, which is what independent reading at this level requires.
Question Stems to Use
Where does the author finally say what the story means? Is it stated or implied?What is the main clause of the longest sentence? What is tucked inside it?What is the tone here, and does it match the seriousness of the point?Which sentence reverses an earlier idea, and why end on it?What did you have to reread, and what made it hard?

Common Mistakes with RI.11-12.10

Stopping at the anecdote

“Mapmakers made up a town, and then a store was named after it.”

Try this: Ask students what the story is evidence for, and send them to the final two sentences before accepting any retelling as an answer.

Getting lost in a long sentence

“The mapmakers didn’t believe the map could draw, so they built a store.”

Try this: Have students mark the embedded clauses in pencil, read the sentence without them, then put each one back and say what it adds.

Scaffolding that never comes off

Grade 12 students who still get a vocabulary list and a summary before every essay

Try this: Plan the fade: in grade 11 preview the hardest sentence together, and by spring of grade 12 let students find it themselves.

Where RI.11-12.10 Fits

Comes BeforeRI.9-10.10Read literary nonfiction in the grades 9-10 band independently by the end of grade 10.
AlongsideRL.11-12.10Read novels, plays and poems at the same level, with the same move from support to independence.L.11-12.3Use a working knowledge of syntax to read complex sentences more fully.
Comes NextW.11-12.10Write routinely about demanding texts, from quick responses to work revised over weeks.

Practice RI.11-12.10

Quick Check

  1. Why did the mapmakers invent Agloe?
  2. What is the main clause of the third sentence?
  3. What claim does the final sentence make?

RI.11-12.10: Other Names

RI.11-12.10CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.10

Common Core State Standards © Copyright 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Official wording from the Common Core State Standards PDFs at corestandards.org, last checked October 14, 2026. The explanation, I can statements, example, mistakes and practice on this page are EMStudio’s own, written beside the official wording. They are not part of the standard.