An Exposition on Understanding Expository Text

Expository texts are the meat and potatoes of the textual world, because expository texts are the ones that convey new information and explain new topics to people. The reason analogies are interest-arousing is that they immediately provide a framework for understanding and organizing the new information, so the reader is able to respond to the new material by applying knowledge from the analogous domain. The minimal criterion for coherence in a text is that the statements in it refer to common concepts. Thus referential coherence is the most basic kind of coherence relation because it is present in all meaningful texts. Causal relations are another prevalent kind of coherence relation. Support relations are the kind of coherence relations that are found in most expository texts but few narrative texts. Mechanism cognitive units are very similar to episode units because they are also composed of a goal linked by motivational coherence relations with a plan of causally linked actions.