English- Exploratory Essay

Exploratory essay is… a narration of the writeres thinking process while doing reserach.  The essay recounts you attempt to examine your questions complexity, explore alternatives and arrive at a solution or answer.

 

The essential motive for exploratory thinking and writing is to keep a problem alive through consideration of multiple solutions or points of view.

 

The key to effective writing is to create a tension between alternative views.  When you start out, you dont know where your thinking will end up; at the outset you might not have an alternative view.

 

Staments like “part of me thinks…, but another part thinks..” forces you to find something additional to say, writing becomes a process of inquiry and discovery.

 

Thinking here is DIALECTIC

-see the question as a genuine problem worth puzzling over

-consider alternative views and play them against eachother.

-look at specific examples and illustrations

-continues the thinking prcess in search of some sort of resolution or synthesis of alternative views

-incorporate the stages of dialectic process into the essay

 

At the beginning of the essay explain- why you are interested in this problem, why you think it is significant and why you have been unable to reach a satisfactory answer

 

Now write a first person chronologically organized narrative account of your thinking process as you investigate your question through research, talking with others and doing your own refelctive thinking

 

Your goal is to examine your questions, problem, is issue from a variety of perpectives, assesing the strengths and weaknesses of different positions and points of view.

 

YOUR GOAL IS NOT TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION BUT TO REPORT ON THE PROCESS OF WRESTLING WITH IT.  You are asked to dwell on the problem, not to solve it.  Your thinking may shift in the progress.  What matters is that you are actively engaged with your problem and demonstrate why it is problematic.

 

TOPIC- Do sports stars bear any responsibility for being “role models?”

No less than 2.5 pages

 

Exploratory Essay/Research – 1

The ability to Wallow in complexity

On a separate paper:

1. Write your Exploratory question.

Your Introduction

Your goal in the Introduction is to hook your reader’s interest in your chosen problem. Often the best way to do so is to show why you yourself became interested in it.

Write about any or all of the following:

· Why do you think you have chosen this particular subject? What interested you?

· Personal connection?

· Specific experiences?

· What do you think are the origins of your feelings?

· What are your first responses/answers to the question?

· Why do you think you feel the way you do now?

· Can you imagine yourself ever changing your mind? Why?

· Can you list (or imagine) different or alternative answers to this question? List some of them.

· How do you feel about these?

· Why?

· At this point, what is the most perplexing, confusing, or puzzling thing about this question?