Irony. Irony is the difference between appearance and reality. What is ironic about the names of the malls listed in the first paragraph of this essay?
Expository Writing and Exposition. Expository writing, also called informative writing, has the primary aim of informing the reader. Some examples of expository writing include news articles and research reports. Exposition is a type of writing that presents facts or opinions in an organized manner. There are many ways to organize exposition. The following are some of the most common:
Analysis breaks something into its parts and shows how the parts are related.
Classification order places subjects into categories, or classes, according to their properties or characteristics.
Comparison-and-contrast-order presents similarities as it compares two things and presents differences as it contrasts them.
Process/How-to writing presents the steps in a process or gives the reader directions on how to do something.
As you read “On the Mall,” decide whether it can be considered an example of expository writing.
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In her essay “On the Mall,” Didion examines the obsessive consumerism of American society. Calling the years after World War II “a peculiar and visionary time,” she sees shopping malls as emblematic of those postwar years, a time during which Americans believed that social and moral progress was infinite and that things could only get better. On this subject, Didion has said, “When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.” “On the Mall” was published in 1979 in Didion’s collection of essays The White Album.
Do you like shopping malls? Why, or why not?
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