: Re: Avoiding the "as you know" trope in exposition When writing fiction, especially in universes other than our own such as sci-fi/fantasy genres, the reader often has to be given a piece of information

@Heady158

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Many good comments already, but let me toss in a few thoughts.

You mentioned having the ignorant character that others can explain things to. Sometimes this is implausible. Like if the story is set on a spaceship with three astronauts on board, it seems unlikely that there would be one in the three who knows nothing about space travel or astronomy. How did he get included on this mission if he's completely ignorant? But if it's a star-liner with 100 passengers, the idea that one is someone on his first interstellar trip and knows nothing isn't inherently implausible.

I've seen a number of SF stories that have one of the characters teaching a history or science class to a group of children. On the surface, this can be a good technique: Presumably children don't know everything that we would expect adults to know. But if you do this, please, have it make sense in the story. I've seen so many where they show the character teaching a class of children, implying that this character is a school teacher ... and then we never again see him or her doing anything to do with teaching. They apparently just quit their teaching job and run off on whatever adventure. Or there's some really transparent introduction, "Dr Jones is an expert on contacting alien races, and so we've asked him to come here today to," etc. This technique worked with Indiana Jones because it made sense for an archaeologist to be a college professor. Maybe you could work in Captain Kirk being a guest lecturer at Starfleet Academy. But I'd have a hard time believing that Captain Kirk teaches kindergarten in his spare time.

In real life, people often state facts that everyone present knows to make a point, for emphasis, or to establish a context for something they want to say that everyone present does NOT know.

Imagine our own world was a fictional alternate history and you wanted to introduce some historical facts.

If you have the president walk into the cabinet room and declare to his top advisors, "As you all know, I am the president of the United States," and stop there, it would be implausible. But if he said, "I've been president for 3 years. It's time I accomplished something besides attending meetings!" That doesn't sound to me like an implausible thing for someone to say.

Or, "If those troops cross the border, this will be the third time Germany has started a world war." It might well be that everyone present knows about World Wars 1 and 2, but it wouldn't be shocking for someone to say it like this to express his concerns.

"As you know, it takes eight weeks to cross the Atlantic by steamship. With this new invention, the airplane, we expect to cut that to only 12 hours." Yes, everyone present knows the first fact. But someone might well state it to set the stage for the next sentence.

You can mention a known fact indirectly. "If we lose this war, it will be America's first defeat since the Vietnam War." This tells the reader that America fought a war that had something to do with Vietnam and lost, without having to spell it out.

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