Nordquist
Dr. Richard Nordquist is a professor of English and rhetoric at Georgia Southern University.
Expository Writing
Expository writing is a means to convey factual information. According to Nordquist, “expository writing’s primary purpose is to deliver information about an issue, subject, method, or idea using facts.” Considering delivering factual information is a very broad scope of writing, exposition can be divided into several different forms:
While each form has a different purpose and may appear to need separate writing approaches, each form can luckily be approached with the same general essay outline. The first section is the introduction: you are introducing your topic, stating your thesis, and giving some background knowledge/context that pertains to the information you’re going to cover later in the essay. The middle section is the body: it consists of multiple paragraphs which you begin with a topic sentence, then you elaborate upon the topic sentence in the rest of the paragraph. The final section is the conclusion: “a concise overview of your thesis… [which is] a means of proposing further action, offering a solution, or posing new questions to explore” (Nordquist).
When writing an expository essay, it’s pertinent to write concisely and without opinion.
A Practical Application for A College Student
If you’re a college student majoring in STEM at a technological school, you may be wondering how learning about expository writing in English class even pertains to your future. Expository writing is not just limited to English-related topics. The expository writing techniques mentioned above can be applied to a STEM student trying to convey their factual information into a lab report, which can be considered a form of an essay.
Just as an expository essay has an introduction, body, and conclusion; a lab report has the same components, albeit worded differently. According to Hunter College, a lab report has six components: title, abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results, and discussion. The title, abstract, introduction, and materials and methods of a lab report fall under the “introduction” section. The abstract should include the “thesis” of your expository essay and the main points from the lab that you are going to address. The introduction and materials and methods should give any background knowledge that is necessary to understand the body of the report.
The results of your lab report would be the body of the expository essay. For an effective body, every paragraph in results could apply the expository technique of a topic sentence near the beginning of the paragraph, with the rest of the paragraph being evidence for the topic sentence. For example, the topic sentence could be a scientific conclusion from a data table and the evidence could be the specific numerical values that support this scientific conclusion.
As for the discussion section of a lab report, this should effectively be the expository conclusion. All of the evidence, graphs, and tables should be tied together into a cohesive scientific conclusion. Just as the expository conclusion suggests proposing further action, offering a solution, or posing new questions to explore, the discussion should also do this. This could be in the form of suggesting a protocol is repeated because an experimental error occurred, or asking a new research question that has implications closely related to the lab report results.
Just as concise language is needed in an expository essay, it is critical in a lab report. A professional and scientific tone in a report makes your conclusions sound more credible.
Questions
When comparing an exposition to a lab report, I wondered about the applications of expository writing on an extended factual piece, such as a thesis. When does a factual piece become too long to apply expository writing techniques?
Works Cited
Nordquist, Richard. “What Is Expository Writing?” ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/expository-writing-composition-1690624.
“Writing Lab Reports – Hunter College,” www.hunter.cuny.edu/rwc/repository/files/WAC/Writing-Lab-Reports.pdf. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.