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Goal
Students will consider an issue based on their
reading, as well as their own experiences. The purpose of this assignment
is to encourage students to think about an issue, to integrate their own
experiences with their reading, and to develop an idea about that issue.
To do this they must evidence the ability to think critically about
texts, to link ideas found in outside sources together and with their own
ideas, and to incorporate material from one of the unit essays to support
and/or connect with their ideas .
Requirements for the Exploratory Essay
Read at least two essays in the unit
Paper: 2-3 pages, with 12 pt. font (at
least 500 words)
The Exploratory Essay should
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Develop a question or idea to explore various ways of seeing it instead of
just quickly coming to a simple conclusion.
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Use the student's experiences and/or observations as evidence to develop
the idea or question.
- Have an introduction that pulls readers into your question/issue and gives
them a general but clear sense of what will follow.
- Cite an essay from The McGraw-Hill Reader as a way of
discussing your question or idea, integrating it smoothly into your own text.
- Lead the reader through the parts of your essay in a way that the reader
sees where you're headed and gives the read a sense of having arrived
somewhere by the conclusion.
- Convey a sense of your writer's voice--without being too informal and
"talky." That is, the style of the essay should have a certain enlivening energy to
it.
- Follow MLA format and be 3-4 pages long, with metatext, submitted to
Blackboard and final draft submitted as a printed copy.
Challenges for students
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To keep a sense of wonder and openness to perspectives other than a
student's initial one and to stories that don't comfortably fit within a
student's point of view. See how Kingsolver
in "Stone
Soup" in The
McGraw-Hill Reader, uses stories to raises problems instead of quickly giving easy
answers.
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To convert story and observation into evidence. In other words, the
stories or observations should not take over the organization of the
essay. Instead, the reader should be able to follow the progression
of points in the essay, not a progression of events in a story, even
though stories are embedded in the essay. Kingsolver's essay is an excellent example
of how
an author can tell stories in the context of exploring a question.
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To begin to recognize the kind of language and tone that is appropriate in
college writing, at the same time developing one's one voice, the sense of
having a presence as a writer and thinker inside their texts
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To learn MLA format.
Example of Exploratory Essay that Raises a Question.
This introduction to a longer article in The New Yorker provides an
excellent model for the
exploratory essay. It is the equivalent of a 2 and 1/2 page
essay. |
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