Basic Structure
The form and goals of the academic essay at Rutgers University may surprise you. If you have come from an institution that required you to competently summarize information provided for you by a textbook or professor, you should be aware that this will not be enough at Rutgers. An expository essay that is only a repetition of someone else's ideas will not pass in English 301, no matter how competent the summary. An expository essay that simply repeats what the class has discussed or what the professor has explained will not pass either.

This is so because the goal of an academic essay in a university is to create new knowledge or understanding. This will involve the summarizing of the views of other sources, but it will also involve moving beyond the information you already have into a new position of your own. Your essays must take the ideas and positions of others into account, of course, but the position that organizes the discussion must be yours. Your essay must be expository in that it seeks to expose new ways of understanding a field of inquiry that were not available before the writing began. At its best, the expository essay teaches the teacher, as well as the writer and the class, something no one knew before. The goal is neither an opinion piece, unrelated to what has already been said by others, nor a slavish devotion to what others have already said, but an informed dialogue between the sources and the writer's own position. For more information on this topic, see Week 4: Making Connections.

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