An expository essay primarily consists of discussing and justifying the topic in a rational way. It sums up as a crisp and to the point piece of writing that thoroughly explains the subject to the readers, explaining the logic behind your topic, thoughts, theorems, ideas or anything else. Keeping the conversation straight to the point and simple, an expository essay does not contain fancy words like a creative writing essay. To explain your work to the readers, students often are required to write such an essay during their academic years, due to which it is essential to know the proper format and layout planning of an expository essay.
There are further different kinds of and expository essay which are discussed below.
- Cause and effect essay: Such an essay explains how things, events and phenomenon are interlinked with each other. The root of the subject is discussed along with its consequences. Mostly, such kinds of essays are commonly written for science and research purpose.
- Process essay: Also known as the ‘How to’ essays, they explain a procedure of a process or an experiment.
- Similarities and difference essay: Such type of an expository essay evaluates the likeness and distinctions between two people, places, events, phenomenon etc. the comparison specifies how the things are same or different.
- Categorization essay: A categorization essay breaks down the subject into subcategories. The subtopics are explained further with relevant facts, evidence and examples.
- Definition essay: As the name itself says, it explains a concept, theorem, work or anything else. The essay explains the topic in an in-depth way, wherein the subject can be either a concrete one such as a place, experiment etc or of an abstract type of slavery, love etc.
To come up with a strong essay that clearly defines your ideas and justifies your topic well, simply follow the guidelines mentioned below.
- Brainstorming well before beginning: Pick out a good topic, which can catch the attention of your audience and is worth a deep discussion. Now, finding the right topic is the task, for which a good time must be spent in brainstorming. Let your brain run across as many ideas as it can think, write them down on a paper and keep thinking until you can think no more. When you are done with the process, you will have an ample number of ideas to choose out from.
- Produce ideas about the selected topic: After choosing the subject matter, the next step is to think what to write about it. A mind map can be the perfect trick to help you out ahead. Write your topic in the centre of a paper, and draw branches out of it, each about a different subtopic. And then, branches out of branches and so on. Keep writing without stopping in the midway, as it would get in way of the flow of your ideas. You would end up finding no more space on the paper to write on!
- Select the apt ideas to be mentioned: With a number of ideas written down before your eyes, it seems that your essay will be a great scoring one. But not all of the ideas would be relating to your subject in the way you want. Eliminate the unimportant ideas, strictly keeping only the apt information in your essay.
- Strong thesis statement: The thesis statement states the purpose of writing your essay. Include the sentence in your introduction itself, which introduces the objective of choosing the subject and what you wish to explain, achieve or justify in the essay. A good thesis statement is a must for a good essay, this work well on it.
- Draft an outline: To explain each point and logic behind your topic, it is important to explain things in an order. Without it, your entire presentation of logic and reasoning may fail, no matter how strong your evidence are. Thus, before you begin writing the final essay, make an outline of your ideas, facts, reasoning, evidence and examples. Work on it until you arrive at the right sequence of the content.
- Write in the third person: An expository essay talks about an event, person, situation etc, it should be written in the third person. It should not sound like your own personal experience of feelings.
- Recheck well: Once you are through with the essay, check it again and again. There are various things which must be evaluated well. The essay should provide an impartial analysis which is supported well by logic and reasoning. Also look for any spelling and grammatical errors. Often it happens that students ignore and submit their work without reading it after finishing, and get their mistakes encircled by their teachers later.
Through the mind map, you have gone thinking further on the sub-topics, which will later help you in deciding the content of the essay.