When instructions ask you to summarize or synthesize an article(s) or movie(s), then write about it in the expository third-person style:
- Expository style explains who, what, when, where, how, and why in a factual, unbiased manner. It must be devoid of opinion or dramatic wording.
- Third-person style refers to what the author wrote about, rather than what you think about the content of the article. Pronouns are typically "she", "he", "they", but the more modern, inclusive way to refer to the author is with "they". Refrain from using second-person pronouns such as "you".
When instructions ask you for a personal opinion or about your process, then write in the first-person style, which allows you to refer to yourself.
Paragraphs must also include:
- Bold style applied to key concept names (not long phrases; not repeated generic words).
- Hyperlinked Titles of the source in a sentence in the paragraph.
- ...not the publisher or domain name.
- ...not a key word or phrase.
The following sample paragraph meets writing requirements because it:
- Is written in the expository third-person style.
- Includes enough detail about who said what.
- Includes bolded key concepts.
- Includes a hyperlink in the title of the article/movie.
When asking questions of a search engine, it is able to list search results very quickly because it has already indexed most of the files online around the world, according to The Internet: How Search Works. Google, for example, sends a spider algorithm out to the Internet to crawl through the hyperlinked web pages so it can categorize and archive them for later. Hyperlinks from one web page to another help the spider find even more pages to index in the database of web pages. Web pages are then ranked by the page title, key words and phrases, and by how many other pages link to them, resulting in page rank. Marketing professionals try to out-smart the algorithms so their pages will list higher in search results. Google must constantly improve the algorithms using machine learning, whereby the algorithm understands cultural meanings and not just single words.
The following sample paragraph does not meet all requirements because it is missing a hyperlink in the title of the article/movie and the key concept names are missing bold style.
When asking questions of a search engine, it is able to list search results very quickly because it has already indexed most of the files online around the world, according to The Internet: How Search Works. Google, for example, sends a spider algorithm out to the Internet to crawl through the linked web pages so it can categorize and archive them for later. Hyperlinks from one web page to another help the spider find even more pages to index in the database of web pages. Web pages are then ranked by the page title, key words and phrases, and by how many other pages link to them, resulting in page rank. Marketing professionals try to out-smart the algorithms so their pages will list higher in search results. Google must constantly improve them using machine learning, whereby the algorithm understands cultural meanings and not just single words.
The following sample paragraph does not meet requirements because it is written in the first-person style, focuses too much on introducing the article rather than providing details about who did what how, as noted in the content of the article, it lacks bold applied to key concept names, and it lacks a hyperlink in the title of the article/movie.
In this paragraph I’ll be talking about things I literally knew nothing about. This paragraph focuses on the search engine article found in the textbook. It talks about some of the ways search engines work, which is about spiders crawling to pick up sites and list them.
The following sample paragraph is copied directly from an article by Google, which is plagiarism. Short quoted passages are allowed in expository writing, as long as the title of the original article is hyperlinked in the paragraph and most of the writing is the student's original writing.
Google Search puts the world's information at your fingertips, helping people find helpful results for billions of queries every day. From ranking systems to features that show up when you search, this series explains what makes Google useful and how we connect you to the information you're looking for.