Topic: Formula for Organizing Expository Writing

10-second review: 1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them; 2. Tell them; And 3. Tell them what you told them.

Source: D Greenburg. The Writer (June 2004), 32. The Writer is a magazine by writers for writers.

Comment: Here’s a real writer telling how he writes. (Expository writing explains something; narrative writing tells a story, usually in chronological order, from beginning to end.)

For some reason this advice about how to organize expository writing has become a cliché. Especially when people woodenly apply it in Microsoft’s PowerPoint, this very exciting approach to communication bores rather than excites. Yet all effective communication, both in writing and in formal speaking, follows this formula. The reader hears or reads the message three different ways. As one of my community college students said, “It’s like hitting your reader over the head three times.”

To me, this formula means an introduction to interest the reader, followed by a thesis sentence or statement of the main idea to be communicated, followed by paragraphs with details headed by topic sentences that develop the thesis sentence and concluded by a last paragraph that summarizes the thesis and its details a third time.

I think I am a fairly effective speaker and writer and I follow this formula every time I write or speak formally. If you don’t organize exposition in this manner, how do you organize it? RayS.