No Monochrome

Try to imagine a world that has absolutely no variations, a world that looks monochromatic (has only one color) and sounds monotonous (has only one sound). Imagine eating the same meal every single day. Even if that meal is pizza, you might eventually grow tired of it!

Living in a world like this one might seem peaceful and predictable for a short while, but soon almost everyone would feel a bit bored. We want variety!

Writing an effective expository text or procedural text requires variety—just as creating music, art, and food do—to engage the reader. You might have information that you want to share for the purpose of clarifying or explaining something. Perhaps you want to explain the steps of a process in a procedural text. Regardless of your intent, the most effective expository and procedural texts contain rhetorical devices, transitional words and phrases, and a variety of sentence structures.

Including variety will help you become a better writer, and it will help your readers follow your thinking and the points you make in your essay. In this lesson about expository and procedural essays, you will learn how to convey information about a topic by writing a multi-paragraph essay that includes rhetorical devices, transitional words and phrases, and different sentence structures. Each section of this lesson will show you how to create variety in your writing.