Expository Writing Quotes

I think the hardest part of writing anything is getting exposition out easily, without hitting people over the head with it.

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.

Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers.

Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.

The Bible is obviously a mixed book. Literary and nonliterary (expository, explanatory) writing exist side by side within the covers of this unique book.

I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.