500-Word Expository Essay
For the expository essay option, topics that are fairly well defined and self-contained can be found in the texts covered in the course. Carrying out this assignment involves two distinct steps.

First, you must make the idea your own — i.e., you must understand it, make sense of it, see it as a candidate for adoption, sufficiently so as to be able to produce an intelligible presentation of it (or at least a sketch of or an outline for such a presentation) to a specific audience (think of an audience made up of your fellow students or any other audience whose characteristics you can effectively represent to yourself). (Note that this rhetorical situation in which you are required to explain somebody else's idea to others is not only common in college classrooms, but it is also very common in professional work where you as a manager may be asked to explain ideas or policies that you did not yourself invent and that you may not find either valid or particularly interesting.)

Second, you must develop a strategy for rendering the idea intelligible to your chosen audience as succinctly as possible (so as to remain fairly close to a target of 500 words in length). Unlike the "text-focused" essays, here you have the widest possible latitude with regard to organization and structure. Analysis, interpretation and argument are intellectual tasks sufficiently identifiable as to make at least plausible the claim that an ideal rhetorical organization can be specified for each, but this is not so for exposition. Of course, any good exposition of an idea or policy must do its job effectively, i.e., it must actually succeed in rendering its subject matter intelligible to its audience. Needless to say, to do this job successfully the expositor must have a modest grasp of that subject matter. Beyond that, the most effective strategy or order of exposition cannot be determined in advance. Many very different organizational strategies can be equally successful in presenting the same subject matter.

Sample 500-Word Essay Topics

1. Explain Nietzsche's statement that the doctrine of will to power offers the "solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment."
2. Explain Nietzsche's claim that "faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism."
3. Explain Spinoza's critique of the use of final causes in explanation.
4. Explain Aristotle's conception of the relationship between moral virtue and practical wisdom.
5. Explain the way in which Plato distinguishes and relates thinking (dianoia) and belief (pistis).