Exploratory essay writing

Exploratory essay is a moderately open form of academic writing that does not seek to answer or solve a problem; instead, it provides you with an opportunity to wrestle with a problem as a way to uncover some of its complexities. Such essays are generally chronological narratives of your research process that embody some genuinely dialectical thinking.

Helpful strategy for wtiting exploratory essays

• The focus of an exploratory essay is a question, rather than a thesis.
• The two main ways to compose an exploratory essay yield different effects: The "in-process" strategy produces immediacy, while a "retrospective" strategy produces more artistically designed essays.
• Exploratory essays chronicle your research actions and the thinking that results from those actions; they address both content-oriented questions and rhetorical questions about possible responses to the problem under consideration.
• Exploratory essays regularly consider the strengths and weaknesses of various different solutions to a perplexing problem.
• Exploratory essays are often dialectical in either the Platonic or Hegelian sense of that term because they recreate the engagement of antithetical positions, sometimes resulting in a productive synthesis of contraries.