Janene van Loon, Arnoud Thüss, Nicole Schmidt and Kevin Haines - Academic Writing in English

1.6 Academic papers: the expository essay

TASK 7 Discuss the connection of the preceding conclusions to the thesis state ments. 1 Was the link between the thesis statement and the conclusion in the pre vious Task easy to make? If not, why was it difficult? 2 Write down the keywords for each thesis statement and compare your keywords to those of other learners. How are these words related to each other in the text? Although many different types of academic texts are similar in tone and structure, they have various purposes and address distinct audiences, result ing in multiple designs of layout. For instance, your aim may be to explain something, to defend a point of view, or to prove something using scientific methods. In the first case, you might write an expository essay; in the second case, you could write an argumentative essay; in the last case, you may opt to write a research report. In the next Section, we discuss several different text types and layouts of academic papers, and in the next Chapter we will further explain the relationship of text type to purpose and audience. Academic papers: the expository essay The expository essay is essentially explanatory , aiming to acquaint the reader with a body of knowledge. It presents other people’s views objectively or pro vides a report of an event or a situation. Expository writing presents a subject in detail ; it is written using facts and statistical information in logical order (see below), with examples. This type of essay is designed to convey information to the reader and explain what is difficult to understand. It is usually an analysis based on preliminary research, which allows you to place what you have researched into a wider context by referring to books or articles. It should provide your reader with a clear understanding of your analyses and conclusions.

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