Process Analysis Assignment

Length: 500 words
Setting forth a process is somewhat like writing the steps of a cooking recipe. However, the step-by-step writing of a recipe is missing an important ingredient (hehe) of expository writing: context. A recipe tells you what to do, but that’s all it does. Take a look at the first example:
Mother Greenway’s Secret Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Ingredients:
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
1 cup butter or margarine
2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 eggs
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp baking powder
1 package chocolate chips
Mix sugars, butter, and eggs together. Mix flour, baking soda, and baking powder together. Combine wet and dry ingredients. Add chocolate chips and mix thoroughly by hand. Roll into small spheres and bake on an ungreased baking sheet for 10 minutes at 350F. Let cool.
Now look at this example:
Mom always catered to my sweet tooth: the not-so-secret ingredient in her famous chocolate chip cookies was two burly cups of sugar—brown and white respectively. She told me she made up for the sugars by using margarine instead of butter (how she might laugh at the butter resurgence of 2018!). I can still remember her insisting that it took less than three cups of flour for her cookies: two-and-three-quarters, to be perfectly precise. Toss in a couple of eggs and a few other items, then bake for 9-10 minutes: that’s what the recipe said. Depending on the oven, what a difference that extra minute made! All the neighbourhood kids cut across our lawn on the way home from school, because Mom baked six dozen cookies per week. Or maybe it’s the other way around…
It would be challenging to achieve the same cookie outcome if the recipe were written like that. And yet, there’s a lot more information—context, especially—in the second example. Think about what that additional information is trying to do, and how it does it.
Your task is to take a process, procedure, or explanation of how something works, and to set it forth as an exposition. Remember that expository writing makes use of description, narrative, and analysis, sometimes simultaneously. Your audience doesn’t know how the process works, so you need to inform them of the steps, but you also need to give them context. Expository writing is supposed to be “pleasing” to read, even if the subject matter isn’t pleasing on its own. You’re welcome to be creative, but try to use some of the techniques we’ve discussed so far in the course to help you along.
Your process analysis will be graded for its clarity, organization, coherence, correctness, and a demonstrated awareness of purpose and audience. Have fun!