Exploratory essay

Exploratory essays are very different from argumentative essays. In fact, an exploratory essay is likely different from any other essay you’ve written. Instead of writing to convince an audience of the validity of a thesis, you will be writing to find out about a problem and perhaps to form some preliminary conclusions about how it might be solved.

Exploratory essays approach a topic from an objective point of view with a neutral tone. Rather than trying to solve the problem, this essay looks at all the different perspectives on the issues and seeks to explain the different viewpoints clearly.

But there is another aspect of the exploratory genre that is equally important. An exploratory essay is, in essence, a retrospective of your writing and thinking process as you work through a problem. It describes when, how, and why you completed certain types of research. This kind of writing is about how you work through problems that require writing and research. You will have to be introspective and think about your thinking process in order for your essay to turn out well.

Body paragraphs should discuss the inquiry process you followed to research your problem. These paragraphs should include the following:

• Introduction of the source (title, author, type of media, publisher, publication date, etc.) and why you chose to use it in your exploration
  
• Important information you found in the source regarding your problem
  
• Why the information is important and dependable in relation to the problem
  
• Some personal introspection on how the source helped you, allowed you to think differently about the problem, or even fell short of your expectations and led you in a new direction in your research, which forms a transition into your next source.