Exploratory Essay

1. The focus of an exploratory essay is a question, rather than a thesis.



2. 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.



3. 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.



4. Exploratory essays regularly consider the strengths and weaknesses of various different solutions to a perplexing problem.



5. 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.

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