1. Use Second Person
You are explaining something to the reader, which means that you should use second person pronoun “you” throughout your essay. Avoid using first person – it makes your writing sound too personal and subjective. The facts should be presented in isolation from the one who recounts them: you do not so much tell about them as your readers learn them.
2. Be Laconic
An expository essay isn’t a kind of writing where you are supposed to digress into details and pepper your writing with prettyism. You don’t tell a story, you expound facts – which mean that you should keep your writing clean, simple, short and clearly understandable. Any time you are confused how to be laconic, you may read some explanatory essay samples to get inspired.
3. Avoid Expressing Opinions
Often we are eager to give the reader our opinion, but it has to be omitted in such kind of paper. You may read some explanatory essay examples to learn to avoid your subjective judgement. It doesn’t mean that you should simply avoid saying “I believe that” and similar phrases. After you’ve written your essay, look it through and seek out everything that may betray your personal opinions on the subject matter: words with positive and negative connotations, half-hidden irony and so on. Their presence makes your writing look unprofessional – don’t believe that you can hide them, your professor has seen hundreds of similar works before and knows what to expect. Sometimes it may happen that your point aligns with any author’s one so you can cite his/her thoughts.
4. Provide a Background
Your job is to explain something, but you don’t know how much your audience already knows about the subject. Therefore, you should provide a minimal necessary amount of supporting information about your topic before you actually start delving into the subject matter on point. Don’t be either overly optimistic or too pessimistic about how much the reader already knows – don’t start to explain the meaning of individual words, on the one hand, but don’t just jump into the action on the other.
5. Conclusion
In the conclusion of your essay, you are supposed to summarize the information you’ve already provided in a couple of short sentences. In addition, it may be a good idea to point out possible larger and wider significance of the topic you’ve just discussed. Perhaps it touches upon some other areas of life or you can draw parallels with another topic, generally considered to be more important. Finally, if you feel that your discussion left some questions unanswered (either inconsequential, trivial or the ones you genuinely have no information about), you should mention it as well.
Writing expository essays requires certain skills – but if you follow these tips, it will come to you eventually.