Expository Text Structure and the Generation of '98

Expository Text Characteristics

Expository texts are intended to convey precise knowledge of a subject. They generally feature two types of structural properties:

• Coherence: Addresses a topic and develops it through one or more main ideas that are ordered and related to each other.
• Cohesion: Forms a network of related concepts using lexical and grammatical tools:

Linguistic Cohesion Tools

• Lexical: Repetition helps the reader understand and follow the information appearing in the text.
• Substitution: Avoids excessive repetition of the same grammatical terms.
• Syntactic Order: Sentences should be logically ordered.
• Conjunctions: Connectors link sentences and paragraphs to organize the text.

Structural Summarization Methods

• Schema: Contains main ideas and brief phrases, representing logical relationships between concepts.
• Concept Map: Consists of concepts and linking words; concepts are expressed with a noun or noun phrase and enclosed in a rectangle or ellipse.
• Summary: A concise statement of the essential message; it must be short, objective, and accurate.
• Shortening: Reductions of phonemes or syllables that occur in words and phrases (e.g., abbreviations).
  

The Generation of '98

The Generation of '98 refers to a group of writers who adopted a similar attitude toward the political, social, and cultural decay of Spain in the late 19th century.

Key Authors and Themes

• Authors: Azorín, Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Antonio Machado.
• National Themes: Focuses on the problems of Spain, reflection on the country's ills, and a revision of history and values.
• Existential Themes: A crisis of values leads to issues such as the passage of time, the obsession with death, and the fate of the individual (loneliness, disappointment, and the meaning of life).
• Style: Noventayochistas accepted the innovations of the modernists but avoided pompous rhetoric.

Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado was born in Seville into a bourgeois family. He studied at the Free Institution of Education and traveled to Paris, where he met Rubén Darío and Pío Baroja. He won a chair at a French Institute, married Leonor in Soria, who died at a young age. After living in Jaén, Segovia, and Madrid, he was elected to the Royal Academy of Language in 1927 and died in southern France.

Machado's Themes and Works

• Themes: Identity, personal fate, time, dreams, love (especially the memory of Leonor), and the landscape (particularly Castile).
• Works: Solitudes, Galleries and Other Poems (1907), Fields of Castile (1912), and New Songs (1924).

Other Notable Works

• Azorín: Route of Don Quixote, The People.
• Unamuno: Mist, Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr.
• Pío Baroja: The Search, The Tree of Knowledge.