Assignment 2 - Claire Barrera

            For this assignment, I selected to read chapter 3 of Steven Krantz book manuscript, “A Primer of Mathematical Writing: Being a Disquisition on Having Your Ideas Recorded, Typeset, Published & Appreciated”. Chapter 3 was title “Exposition” and its main focus was about how to write an article that gives a general overview of a subject that one is an expert on. In this section, Krantz starts out my explaining the structure of a good expository article. Krantz emphasizes that a well written expository article has a preface, which is a more detailed summary of what the article is about, a thesis that can be argued for or against and is not based on an opinion. Also, Krantz believes that it is important to have a thought-provoking conclusion and an extensive bibliography. Krantz believes that the bibliography is important because it shows the reader how much research one has done before writing an article.

            In this same chapter, Krantz also explains how to write an opinion piece of writing. This is a different form of writing compared to expository writing because an expository article is something that requires extensive research and in mathematical articles, it often requires many proofs. However, it is still a crucial step to conduct research and formulate and arguable claim for opinion writings. Krantz explains when one is writing about a topic as an opinion piece one “must know clearly and consciously what that something is, and how you propose to formulate it and to defend it” (Krantz, 105). This explains how one must conduct research that both agrees and disagrees with one’s opinion in order to construct a reasonable opinion piece.

            I found this chapter to be very informative because this was one of the few times where I learned how to apply expository and opinion writing to mathematics. A majority of the writing I do for mathematics is proofs or explanations of answers which is very straight forward. Also, in proof-based writing, the research is the computations or theorems that were used to find a solution. I found this chapter very helpful and I will keep it in mind when I write for mathematics.