Expository essays generally aim at presenting either the opinion or ideas of another person without trying to express your own estimate of what you think both about the person and his ideas, or at recounting certain event – again, with no personalization.

For many people such an approach is a rather difficult one, especially if they have to write on something or someone they have strong feelings about, for they want to express themselves; moreover, the more you try to banish personalization from the text, the less possible it is to write something original. Thus, no matter what types of expository essays you are working on, you have to keep the balance between becoming too dry and starting to express your own ideas on the subject.

Of course, there is such thing as the expository argumentative essay, in which you are supposed not only to tell about the ideas of another person, but also say what you think about them. However, this kind of academic writing is not very common, for it to a certain extent contradicts the very idea of expository essays.

All types of expository essays require you to carefully analyze the subject matter; it means that you should express the thesis of the person in question, try to understand what are its bases, how does the idea look in the larger context and so on. Don’t mix it up with defining your own opinion or trying to create this or that opinion in the reader – your task is simply to study, analyze and try to explain what, in your opinion, is not that easy to understand from the text itself. The best description of the task before is this: you should take the author’s idea apart, study it carefully, explain how it works and show how to put it together.