A Focused Explanation: Presenting Established Information and Your Own Ideas

Writing for her instructor and classmates in an English class, Patricia Lyu can assume that the psychological concept she is explaining is unfamiliar to her audience, and because it is a topic in her Introduction to Psychology textbook, she can be confident that it is widely accepted and a basic building block of the field. However, when she applies the concept to a book her readers know well and uses the concept to interpret Henry Dobbins’s “peculiar habit” in The Things They Carried (par. 11), Lyu’s purpose becomes more complicated. She is not only reporting established information about a concept but also presenting her own ideas. Her readers are not likely to question the concept, as long as she provides authoritative sources to back it up, but they may very well question her application of the concept. Therefore, Lyu needs to provide evidence, quoting from The Things They Carried to convince readers that her use of the concept makes sense and that it helps to explain Dobbins’s behavior. Concept explanations nearly always entail this kind of shift from reporting established information to presenting the writer’s own ideas about the concept and offering supportive evidence.