RI.8.10: Read Literary Nonfiction Independently
Also written as CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.8.10 · Cluster: Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity.
The Official Wording
By the end of the year, read and comprehend literary nonfiction at the high end of the grades 6-8 text complexity band independently and proficiently.
Common Core State Standards, Grade 8, Reading: Informational Text · Read it at the source · Checked October 14, 2026
What RI.8.10 Means in Plain English
By the end of eighth grade, students read literary nonfiction, such as memoirs, speeches and narrative histories, at the hard end of the grades 6 to 8 range without scaffolds. A story of Shackleton’s ship that opens with its sinking and then flashes back is one they untangle alone.
Seventh grade (RI.7.10) read the same band with scaffolding at the high end. Eighth grade removes it. Ninth grade (RI.9-10.10) moves up to the grades 9 to 10 band with scaffolding again at its high end, and students read that end independently by the close of tenth grade.
RI.8.10 I Can Statements
- I can read a hard memoir, speech or narrative history on my own.
- I can follow a true story that is told out of time order.
- I can explain a writer’s figurative lines in plain words.
RI.8.10 Worked Example
The passage opens at the end of the story and leans on figurative language, and the weak answer stumbles on both.
On November 21, 1915, twenty-eight men stood on a sheet of floating ice in the Weddell Sea and watched their ship go under. In a few minutes the Endurance was gone, and the ice closed over the place where she had been.She had been a prisoner for ten months. In January, only a day’s sail from the coast of Antarctica, the pack ice had closed around her like a fist, and no amount of chopping or sawing could pry her loose.All through the polar winter the ice carried the ship north, and by spring its pressure was bending her beams like green sticks. In late October her timbers began to split, and the men hauled their tents, sledges and three lifeboats onto the ice.Their leader, Ernest Shackleton, had come to make the first crossing of Antarctica on foot. Now he set himself a smaller goal: to bring every one of them home. It took almost ten more months, an open-boat voyage of some 800 miles across one of the roughest seas on Earth and a climb over unmapped mountains, but every man lived.In 2022, explorers found the wreck nearly two miles down, her name still readable across the stern.
Common Mistakes with RI.8.10
Reading the opening scene as the first event
“First the ship sank, then the ice trapped it.”
Try this: Have students number the events in time order in the margin, then compare that order with the order the writer tells them.
Taking figurative lines literally
“His new goal was smaller, so it was easier.”
Try this: Ask whether the rest of the paragraph agrees with the literal reading, and if it does not, look for what the writer really means.
Saving hard texts for read-alouds
Every challenging memoir or speech read aloud by the teacher, none read alone
Try this: Assign a short, hard nonfiction passage for independent reading each week, followed by one question that checks real comprehension, not recall.
Where RI.8.10 Fits
Practice RI.8.10
Quick Check
- Which happened first: the sinking or the ship getting trapped?
- What does the writer mean by saying the ice bent the ship’s beams “like green sticks”?
- Why does the writer call Shackleton’s new goal “smaller”?