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Review what expository text is and what purpose it serves.
The word “exposition” basically means “explanation.” Text that is expository, therefore, sets forth some sort of explanation or description of a given theory, issue, or problem. In everyday life, we see expository text all the time. The road sign alerting drivers to a closed lane ahead is expository text, as is the recipe for your favorite chocolate cake, or the directions that tell you how to set up your new computer.
In the study of English/Language Arts, expository text can generally be classified as nonfiction. Political speeches such as the “Gettysburg Address” are exposition, as are philosophical arguments, critical essays, social commentaries, biographies, and histories. Student book reports and essays are expository, as are debates and oral presentations. Exposition seeks to describe a true and factual response to the real world. While its purposes vary from plain description to subtle persuasion and even outright trickery, all exposition shares one common trait: the expression of the author’s thoughts, theories, or ideas.
The ability to interpret expository text depends on two basic skills. The reader must have basic reading comprehension abilities, and the writer must have the capacity for clear self-expression. Even the most organized exposition will be impossible for the inattentive reader to understand. On the other hand, not even the most punctilious reader will be able to understand exposition that is unstructured or illogical or both.
Reading and writing skills are interrelated in a stimulus/response loop. Finding the beginning of this loop is like choosing the chicken over the egg, or vice versa. You might define the primary text as the initial stimulus. Whether the literature is fiction or nonfiction, short story or political polemic, the act of reading stimulates a subsequent response, which might take the form of book review, debate, or critical essay.
That subsequent response has its own audience, such as a teacher or the rest of the class, for whom it becomes a secondary stimulus. The audience interprets, classifies, and analyzes the student’s argument; this process then stimulates them to make a response of their own, and so it goes.
In truth, the stimulus/response loop of reading and writing has no beginning or end. The short story or political polemic is itself a response to some other stimulus, a link in a chain that could probably be traced to the beginning of recorded history when human beings first began to tell each other what they were thinking. The chain extends into the future, when readers of new generations will formulate their response to the ideas and theories being developed today.
Every teacher, no matter how new, has had to face and somehow conquer the same dreaded, ubiquitous question: “Why do we have to read this?” For the English teacher, this question is most likely to arise during a study of expository text. Students like stories and plays—literary works that entertain them. Some even enjoy reading poetry. But Socrates’ Apology? Why on Earth should they have to read that? And what good reason could there possibly be for them to write about it?
This question is far easier to parry if students understand that all literature, even the driest, most ancient philosophy, is nothing more than somebody’s response to an experience of some kind. Probably, the experience was fairly significant—in the case of Socrates and his Apology, it was a death sentence that he was expected to carry out on himself. Who wouldn’t want to read what someone in that position had to say? Once you read his response, it seems only human to have some kind of reaction to the poor guy’s situation. In short, we read to share in others’ worlds, and we write to share our worlds with others.
This lesson takes a step-by-step approach to exploring expository text and how to go about interpreting it. The following topics will be discussed: strategies for reading comprehension, modes of exposition, rhetorical tactics, supporting an argument, logical fallacies, and text and graphic elements.