Professional writers usually begin an exploratory writing project with and idea or a question and some sense of their general purpose. For example, in writing an essay on homer’s lliad you might reflect, at the beginning of the lliad, achilles and agamemnon boast and bait each other in a way that makes me think of adolescent gang leaders challenging each other. I’d like to explore the possible parallels from that germ of an idea, you could start digging for material, taking notes, drawing comparisons, and working out a thesis.

Because writers don’t know at the outset exactly what they are going to say in exploratory writing. For the suggested essay on the lliad, the thesis might read, in homer’s lliad the conflict between the greek chiefs agamemnon and achilles stems from the same issues that cause wars between young gang leaders in today’s cities. Competition over girls, taunts about cowardice, quarrels over booty, and fear that someone is being dissed. Such a sentence could serve as an anchor for a first draft, but it could change or even disappear as the paper developed. And exploratory piece is no harder to write than an explanatory piece, but it is harder to plan because it resists a systematic approach. Nevertheless, may writers enjoy the process of discovering ideas through the act of writing. It can be exciting to see suddenly how two ideas connect or to recognize parallels between a current celebrity scandal and novel you’re studying.

Many college writing projects are exploratory, particularly in the liberal arts so are many magazine articles and personal essays. For instance, your writing would be exploratory if you wrote a profile of a political activist on your campus or a reflective essay on the inequities of college entrance exams. Start your exploratory project by hosing a promising topic then look at several sources for material, and explore your central idea through brainstorming or talking to people.

How to Make Teaching Essay Writing Fun

Choose an audience, but only tentatively – you can’t always know in advance whom you’re writing for and find your focus. When you finish a substantial draft of an exploratory piece, review it and ask yourself three questions: is it clear? is it thoughtful? is it interesting? if you can say i think so to all three, you probably have an effective start. other pages in this section: in class writing 149 perhaps the easiest way to use exploratory writing is to set aside five minutes or so during a class period for silent, uninterrupted writing in response to a thinking or learning task. Students can write at their desks at the beginning of a class period while the teacher writes on the board perhaps an assignment or material for the days class , takes attendance, or prepares materials for the class such as recordings, smart classroom or television presentations, etc.

Examples of such writing assignments are a review question, a question intended to synthesize materials covered, or a question intended to stimulate thought and interest in the days class topic. A class can also be interrupted for a brief period of in class writing if the students run out of things to say, if the discussion gets so heated that everyone wants to talk at once, or if the material is difficult and a writing question can help the students to articulate what they have understood so far. Writing can also be used at the end of class to help the students sum up and assimilate a lecture or discussion.

journals 149 journals can be assigned in a variety of ways: open ended journals students are asked to write a certain number of pages per week or a certain length of time per week about any aspect of the course. Sometimes called learning logs, such journals leave students free to write about the course in any number of ways. Students might choose to summarize lectures, to agree or disagree with a point made by someone in class, to raise questions that may be addressed to the professor or the class later on, to apply some aspect of the course to personal experience, to make connections between different strands of the course, to express excitement at encountering new ideas, or for any other purpose. The journal becomes a kind of record of the students intellectual journey through the course. The instructor could collect the journals for review periodically, once or twice a semester, or not at all. semistructured journals although they give students nearly as much freedom as open ended journals, semistructured journals provide guidance in helping student writers think of things to say.

College Essay Rock Climbing

For example, a teacher might ask students to begin each entry by summarizing an important idea that they have learned since the previous entry, either from class or from reading, and then to respond to questions given by the professor. Many teachers develop their own sets of general or specific questions to guide students journal entries. guided journals in a guided journal, students respond to content specific questions developed by the instructor. By designing tasks that require wrestling with important course material, the teacher guides students out of class study time. Teachers usually ask students to write three or four times a week for fifteen minutes each time, but give students only one or two questions per week and ask for more elaborated responses.