One of the main practical tasks of modern education is to provide students with diversified knowledge, develop analytical thinking in them, guide them in doing in-depth research, and analyze findings. And exploratory essay writing perfectly copes with all these tasks.
When writing an essay, a student develops following skills:
- seeing acute problems;
- asking right questions;
- formulating reasonable hypotheses;
- defining concepts and structuring/ classifying material;
- conducting experiments;
- working with the text;
- drawing conclusions;
- proving one’s ideas.
Of course, writing nuances of each field of study are different. Regardless of the topic orientation, the researcher proceeds from the nature of the problem, goals and tasks of the work, and the specific material he has. Let's turn to rules of writing a winning paper.
What Is an Exploratory Essay?
Exploratory essay writing is in some way similar to developing a project. There is a significant difference. The main goal of exploratory essay writing is to develop skills of independent cognitive activity (goal setting, necessary information gathering, material analysis, concept generalizations, conclusion formulating, etc.). In other words, this academic assignment is targeted towards development of the student's ability to work with the scientific literature.
Features of Exploratory Essays
Exploratory essay writing involves throughout analysis of the issue and problem understanding. No surprise that the task requires a lot of efforts and time. If you use outdated tools and do not follow the “strategy,” you will need to spend hours studying literature and sorting it, without bringing any value to exploratory essay writing. You can optimize the process and spend much less effort when following our recommendations.
Clearly formulate the topic - if you do not know what exactly you are going to write about. It will be impossible to find necessary information; in the end, you can spend hours searching “useless” facts. Try to formulate a clear question of once you just start working on an essay. At this point, we recommend you choose an extensive topic and do quick preliminary research before you formulate a specific question.
A good question should
- Be clear;
- Be acute and important to a lot of readers;
- Have a scientific background for your research.
If your key question doesn’t fall within the above criteria, the risk that your essay will not have any sense is really high.
Use online sources to collect information – academic search engines can assist you with conducting research online. The following search engines will save you a lot of time.
- iSEEK Education;
- RefSeek;
- INFOMINE;
- Microsoft Academic Search;
- WolframAlpha.
You can complete the research material by using data from books and scientific journals.
Manage data smartly – when doing research, it is important not to get lost in the huge amount of the collected material. If you find an article that will be useful to your essay, save it somewhere. You can spend a lot of time trying to re-find it.
With the help of modern data management tools, you can easily save all the necessary information and even sort it out depending on your needs. These are some of the platforms that can help you with the matter:
- Mendeley;
- Qiqqa;
- Endnote Basic;
- Colwiz.
Main Exploratory Essay Questions
The goal setting is most important in exploratory essay writing. It determines the purpose and contents of your work. Since in many disciplines the goal can be expressed in the form of the question, it is reasonable to formulate the theme in the questionnaire way. In order for the exploratory essay to reach its point, you should keep in mind the following.
- The key question should be focused on specific aspects of the chosen topic.
- Write it down in different ways to view and select the best formulation.
- The question should be clearly and briefly formulated. If it is complex and long, divide it into two or three parts.
- It should be unambiguously clear why the question is being asked.
- The question should touch on you intellectually and emotionally.
- It should be impossible to answer the question without research.
Choosing a Topic for an Exploratory Essay
As it goes with the key question, choosing and formulating exploratory essay topics
is of great importance. Therefore, before deciding on a particular formulation, follow our recommendations:
- Formulate several versions/ types of a topic (at least 3);
- Match each topic variant the answer it may have (not less than 3 answers per topic);
- Draft a detailed conclusion for each topic;
- Select the topic that involves most interesting facts and conclusions.
Having done such brainstorm, it will be easier to pick a winning theme for your paper.
Facing a problem with selecting a topic for a research paper, find a portion of inspiration here.
Exploratory Essay – Writing Process
You can ease the writing process by preparing a detailed 1-page outline for an essay. It should serve you as a plan defining what information you are to include in each part of the paper. The outline should be written in a free statement format and include only main points for the introduction, body, and conclusion.
One can ease the writing process by reading exploratory essay examples. Find some samples in English for your inspiration on our website.
Writing an outstanding essay is easy; follow our tips.
Introduction
Introduction is an overview of study background. It reveals relevance of the topic, its purpose, and objectives. The purpose of the exploratory essay is formulated in the way proving the necessity of getting the final result. It is also important to indicate specific tasks of the essay so that the reader knows what’s going to be discussed further in the text.
Body
Body serves as a space to present your findings and analyze them. What’s important here is that you should split all your main points and discuss them in separate paragraphs. The main feature of exploratory essay requires you to analyze every piece of information, without just quoting data found without the copyright. As its name suggests, the paper is to explore the question from different angles.
Check out our practical guide on how to format quotes in academic papers.
Conclusion
The conclusion sums up any work done. This part of the paper should contain reasoned conclusions on the topic. It starts with justification of relevance of the studied subject and continues with the argumentation of the goal; the conclusion is closely connected with the body and introduction; there should be a logical link between the three parts.
Although essay writing may seem difficult to many people at first sight; it is, in fact, isn’t so once you get prepared by doing extensive research and developing a detailed outline. Remember that a correctly formulated key question can ease the task.
