Understanding Different Types of Texts: Narrative, Descriptive, Instructive, Argumentative, and Expository

TEXT TYPOLOGY

What is a text? A language unit, spoken or written, with different sizes, communicative functions, social purposes, types, genres, and linguistic features.

Narrative Texts

To tell a story.

• Sequences of events and time
• Fictional or nonfictional
• Narrator: first person (protagonist or witness) or third person (omniscient)

Examples: Myths, fairy tales, stories, science fiction, historical fiction, novels, newspaper reports.

Grammatical features: Dynamic verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, adverbials, and adverb clauses.

Scaffold: 1. Orientation: who, when, where is happening. 2. Complication: Triggers a series of events. 3. Sequence of events: characters react to the complication. 4. Resolution: Problem is solved. 5. Coda: Moral to the story.

Descriptive Texts

To describe an entity or event.

• Information describing a scene, person, or object
• More technical-objective or more impressionistic subjective
• Features without personal opinions

Examples: Descriptions of a particular building, a specific animal, a particular place, a specific person.

Grammatical features: Relational processes, adjectives, topic sentences, other noun modification (e.g. relative clauses), attributes or facts, mostly simple present tense for universal truths.

Scaffold: 1. Opening statement introducing the subject. 2. Series of paragraphs describing the subject. 3. Conclusion.

Instructive Texts

To instruct how to do something.

• Information about how to achieve a goal: Steps to follow a procedure
• Concerned with concrete future activity

Examples: Recipes, itineraries, instruction manuals, directions.

Grammatical features: Sequences of actions, sentences beginning with verbs, imperatives, commands, adverbial clauses, infinitive phrases of purpose, adverbs, technical language.

Scaffold: 1. Introductory statement with the goal. 2. Materials needed for completing the procedure. 3. A sequence of steps in the correct order.

Argumentative Texts

To convince someone of something.

• Receiver’s beliefs must be changed
• Negate/affirm statement
• Objective appearance

Examples: Advertising text, commentary, editorial, speech.

Grammar features: Connectors and sequences, words to qualify statements, compound and complex sentences, modals, and adverbs.

Scaffold: 1. Thesis. 2. Facts, examples, appeals to authority, or counter-argument. 3. Reasons in order of importance. 4. Conclusion.

Expository Texts

To explain how something works.

• Identify and characterize phenomena factually
• Subjective (essay) or objective (summary)
• Analytical or synthetic

Examples: Newspaper articles, reports, textbooks, scientific and academic essays, summaries.

Grammatical features: Temporal and causal circumstances and conjunctions, simple present tense, some use of passive, detailed nominal groups, stative state verbs and modals, technical terms related to the subject, general nouns.