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Chapter 8 asks you to write an exploratory essay, a moderately open form of academic writing that doesn't seek to answer or solve a problem; instead, it provides you with an opportunity to wrestle with a problem as a way to uncover some of its complexities. Such essays are generally chronological narratives of your research process that embody some genuinely dialectical thinking. By the end of the chapter, you should understand the following: 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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