Monday, September 26, 2011

Kathryn McDermott blog #7

     As the Pearson text explains, there are many different key factors to writing an exploratory essay. One that I quickly found in chapter 5 was "The essential move for exploratory thinking and writing is to keep a problem alive through consideration of multiple solutions or points of view" (Pearson 107). I did not know what an exploratory essay even was before reading this chapter and I feel like that gave a good explanation in a simple sentence. It is important to keep the reader interested throughout the essay by demonstrating different view points.
     A second important element to writing a good exploratory essay that I found is "Instead of a single, focused question, you might start with a whole cluster of related questions swimming in your head" (Pearson 110). This is good to think about because it explains that when we start our paper we do not want to think of just one question. It will make for a better paper if, while were beginning our paper, we think of multiple questions that all focus on our subject of writing. That way we can have a broad group of research that is all different, yet all related.
     Lastly, there is revising, which is important with all writing, but viewed differently for exploratory essays. It says in the text "When they revise, their major concern is to improve their essay's interest level by keeping it focused and lively. Often drafts need to be pruned to remove extraneous details and keep the pace moving" (Pearson 115). With most papers we focus on organization and grammar during revising. However, by the time of revising for an exploratory essay, that should already be taken care of. By the time of editing, what's left to be focused on is the actual text, keeping the reader focused and the paper on topic.

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