EXPOSITION BY NARRATION AND DESCRIPTION.  The commonest method of developing a special feature article is that which combines narration and description with exposition.  The reason for this combination is not far to seek.  The average person is not attracted by pure exposition.  He is attracted by fiction.  Hence the narrative and descriptive devices of fiction are employed advantageously to supplement expository methods.  Narratives and descriptions also have the advantage of being concrete and vivid.  The rapid reader can grasp a concrete story or a word picture.  He cannot so readily comprehend a more general explanation unaccompanied by specific examples and graphic pictures of persons, places, and objects.

Narration and description are used effectively for the concrete examples and the specific instances by which we illustrate general ideas.  The best way, for example, to make clear the operation of a state system of health insurance is to relate how it has operated in the case of one or more persons affected.  In explaining a new piece of machinery the writer may well describe it in operation, to enable readers to visualize it and follow its motions.  Since the reader’s interest will be roused the more quickly if he is given tangible, concrete details that he can grasp, the examples are usually put first, to be followed by the more general explanation.  Sometimes several examples are given before the explanatory matter is offered.  Whole articles are often made up of specific examples and generalizations presented alternately.

To explain the effects of a new anaesthetic, for example, Mr. Burton J. Hendrick in an article in McClure’s Magazine, pictured the scene in the operating-room of a hospital where it was being given to a patient, showed just how it was administered, and presented the results as a spectator saw them.  The beginning of the article on stovaine, the new anaesthetic, illustrating this method of exposition, follows: 

A few months ago, a small six-year-old boy was wheeled into the operating theater at the Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled Children, in New York City.  He was one of the several thousand children of the tenements who annually find their way into this great philanthropic institution, suffering from what, to the lay mind, seems a hopelessly incurable injury or malformation.  This particular patient had a crippled and paralyzed leg, and to restore its usefulness, it was necessary to cut deeply into the heel, stretch the “Achilles tendon,” and make other changes which, without the usual anesthetic, would involve excruciating suffering.  According to the attendant nurses, the child belonged to the “noisy” class; that is, he was extremely sensitive to pain, screamed at the approach of the surgeon, and could be examined only when forcibly held down.

As the child came into the operating-room he presented an extremely pathetic figure—­small,