How To Start Off An Exploratory Essay: Tips & Tricks

Starting of any essay can be tricky even for students who are particularly gifted at writing academic papers. However, there are various things to bear in mind whilst writing the work, with some useful tips and tricks outlined below.

Picking something to write about for your exploratory essay

Before you can start the actual writing process, you need to pick a good topic to write about in the first place. An exploratory essay is similar to an argumentative paper; however, you don’t necessarily need to arrive at a conclusion, but rather provide the reader with different points of view that can be taken on the subject. Essentially, you are exploring in more detail any possible answers to a question that you have asked.

Creating a strong introduction

As with just about any essay, you need to create a strong introduction. With this style of paper you need to outline exactly what the topic involves, and what question you are asking. You then need to give the reader some idea of what possible conclusions can be reached, as this will help to lead nicely into the body section, where you need to provide different arguments based on the potential conclusions that could be arrived at.

The introduction doesn’t necessarily need to be too long, so long as you ensure that you write with as much clarity as possible. In fact, you need to ensure that the reader has a good idea of what to expect from the essay to come, which means you need to identify precisely what question it is that you intend to answer.

Using topic sentences in your paper

Topic sentences are great way of bringing clarity to your paper. They should be used at or near to the beginning of a paragraph, and will essentially outline every new argument that you intend to make. A topic sentence essentially involves describing the topic that you wish to talk about, as well as giving a controlling idea. The controlling idea essentially demonstrates what stance you will take on this particular argument.

Having included a topic sentence at the beginning of your paragraph, it is important that the remainder of the paragraph is then related to the topic sentence. Therefore, you should not include any unnecessary information that does not correspond to the argument you are trying to make. If you wish to bring up any other points, then you can include these in further paragraphs later on in the body section.