Crafting Your Exposition

Your detailed, guided tour of the evidence is probably the most important part of your paper. In developing this material, you will face a new set of choices: weighing how much or how little evidence is needed to make a particular point, assessing whether and when you must contextualize, excerpting and highlighting without sacrificing elementary fairness and intellectual honesty. This chapter considers the opportunities and challenges that occur down at this level, as you formulate individual paragraphs, sentences, captions, and footnotes. It concludes with a section about tone, one of the most important dimensions of academic writing, yet one that rarely receives sustained attention in the classroom, or in manuals about the research process.