Effective 3 Steps Exploratory Essay Guide
Writing a research text is one of the types of academic tasks, writing in which a student needs to work out a specific problem or analyze an idea or phenomenon without giving a personal touch. Let`s define how to write exploratory essay.
This work should be a detailed picture, according to which you can give an idea of the depth of researching the collected material.
First of all, the necessary aspects that can ensure success in writing the essay are:
- Ability to express thoughts;
- Style;
- Language of writing.
Moreover, the stylistic requirements for your work consist not only of everything connected with the modern literary language but also of a written scientific speech that requires a presentation in the form of reasoning and evidence.
Developing tactics, the student concretizes the goal, i.e. defines the object and subject of the search, and also selects the necessary sources. Finally, all activities are divided into stages, the sequential implementation of which will help to realize the research strategy.
Exploratory Essay Format
The research text, like any other type of an essay, has the following structure:
- Introduction. In this part, the student needs to formulate a thesis, justify the choice of topics (optional), evaluate the relevance, indicate the purpose and objectives of the work, and also characterize the literature that was used.
- Main part. This item requires the most attention. The student should analyze the literature related to the topic. Here you need to describe why this or that source is important for studying the problem that is explored in your work. In addition, describe your own attitude to this resource, emphasizing the impact on the further development of the research.
- Conclusion. Here you need to summarize everything that was said earlier, draw conclusions and summarize the information presented in the main part.
1. Selecting a topic and drawing up a work plan. There are a lot of good exploratory essay topics, so choosing a theme is quite a simple task. If you have a list of topics, choose the one you like the most. However, if you think that you have a really good idea for an exploratory essay while topics that are offered, you do not like it at all, discuss it with the teacher.
Remember, that even boring discipline can have something interesting. What is more, you can connect one discipline with another. For instance, a history buff while preparing an essay on jurisprudence may consider the history of the development of law. A musician who has become a student at a medical university may consider the effect of music on health. You are free to choose any topic if the teacher allows it.
The next task is to draw up a work plan. Stages of your essay are the components of research activity. They are carried out for a given predetermined period of time and end with the creation of a specific intermediate research product.
- The first stage is usually associated with the study of the problem, literature and preliminary development of the research apparatus. Here we need to arm ourselves with the necessary knowledge and skills to create research products.
- At the second stage students carry out collection, systematization, description, comparison, analysis and evaluation of their own material.
- The third stage involves the synthesis of results, obtaining general conclusions, testing the summation, etc.
2. Search and study of the literature. After the thinking process is completed, the topic is selected and a detailed plan is drawn up, you can proceed to this part of the work. With the advent of the Internet, finding literature on a topic has become much easier. You don’t have to dig in a file cabinet and shovel hundreds of books for hours. It is enough to make a request in a search engine.
Alas, the network has a lot of “bullshit” (that is, absolutely useless, often false information). Definitely, you should not use regular sites, banks of abstracts and reports or other similar resources. Wikipedia needs to be handled carefully, double-checking the information. The best source is a scientific work. You can find them online, for instance, using Google Academy. If there are posted only links to the work, you will have to go to the library. Save the most valuable information to your computer and select the key points that you want to print in your own words for the uniqueness of the report. You have not to copy someone else’s work.
A study of the literature allows to understand what is already known in the framework of the chosen scientific topic, familiarize the basic terms and compare the views of different authors on the problem.
3. Essay Writing. The introduction and conclusion of this type of academic work have a small volume, leading to the research itself and summarizing it.
As for writing the main part, it can be divided into two stages.
The first part of the work, as a rule, is devoted to theoretical issues related to how the studied problem is developed in the print media. We need not only to make a review and brief analysis of the sources that are used in writing of work and note what was done on the topic by the predecessors. We should also determine our approaches and position. It is very important to understand the history of the problem’s development and show attempts to solve it by others.
This part of the work is an opportunity to enter into an interesting and extremely useful dialogue with wise like-minded people who will not only add important facts to your exploratory essay but also share ideas that will become the source of your own thoughts. And they, in turn, will help the birth of your ideas.
In general, at the stage of describing the found sources, you record the achieved, present level of knowledge in terms of “is”, “required”, “necessary”. It indicates the means by which it contributes to the disclosure of the topic and resolution of the problem.
The second part of the work may be devoted to the embodiment of the student’s exploratory essay ideas. Having described and systematized what was done by the predecessors, tell about your plans. Prove your own ideas not only with the position of different authors but also with personally found facts extracted from other sources.
Explore memorials, archival documents, experiments, museum items, heirlooms, etc. Mention the main archival funds that have become the most significant for you or museum items, rich in interesting and previously unknown information. Compare the results with the literature data. Determine their accuracy.
You can uncover exploratory essay questions by referring only to the works of others. Own research is not a mandatory part of the work. However, it will definitely give a scientific touch to the essay and significantly improve your professional skills.
