The Characteristics of Expository Essays - Essay Example

An expository essay is usually a ‘how-to’ essay or one that analyzes an event or an object. The two essays under consideration ‘Dinner Party Table Settings’ and ‘Cochlear Implants’ qualify to be categorized as expository because the former tells us how to host a formal dinner party while the latter provides information on the features of cochlear implants and their usefulness. Both the essays contain detailed informative processes explaining such things as the differences between traditional hearing aids and cochlear implants or the preparation of frosted fruit.

The functions of time and space have an important role to play in an expository essay. The author of the second essay at first wonders whether she should go for a cochlear implant and with the passage of time, in the light of certain experiences, she establishes how the thought of getting an implant herself occupied her mind more and more. In the other essay, space settings dominate the content, giving the reader a detailed picture of the position of seats, plates, forks, glasses and even candles.

The organizational choice is obvious in both because, the cochlear implant being a recent advance in science, the chronology is important in differentiating it from the earlier solutions devised for the deaf, while for the host of a party, the first concern is ‘right arrangements’ having to do with ‘where is what’. This is responsible for another difference between the two essays: the tense used. Present tense is more common in the expository type unless due to the ‘time’ order, the past tense becomes inevitable here and there.

So we see past tense has no use in the essay at a dinner party.