Frames, Content Organization, and Themes in Student Expository Essays.

Abstract

This study analyzes the structure of expository essays in terms of writer predispositions and reader expectations--the "frames" by which written communication proceeds. A frame consists of the sets of conventions shared by writers and readers. These sets of conventions provide written prose with a structure by which readers can reconstruct a writer's frames while reading. An essay's thematic structure is an important way by which the language frames in exposition are signalled and the main themes in a expository essay are highlighted by the writer so as to indicate relationships within that structure. In order to underst and the interaction of writers and readers through their shared expository frame, I analyzed the structure, content organization, of sixty expository essays taken from the writing assessment at the University of Michigan. In this analysis, I discovered that the best writers were able to organize and produce a unified, coherent presentation of content and to signal for readers that content's organization through the use of theme highlighting devices, such as word and sentence ordering, special syntactic structures, or cohesive devices. Furthermore, a reader's judgment of quality in essays in influenced by the writer's skill at indicating content organization through the use of an expository frame. In a reading investigation, I determined that readers are better able to discern the content organization in essays judged to be high quality than in essays judged to be of lesser quality. Thus, readers use their expository frame to judge quality in exposition. Since content organization and specifically theme highlighting are important indications of expository frames, students must pay explicit attention to structure when learning to write. The goal in composition courses should be to help students perceive patterns in structure as they read and write, to plan and to revise their plans during the writing process. Through learning to underst and their many choices within exposition, students gain control and power over their own language use.