Believing and Doubting: Exploratory Writing

Though I’ve had a fair amount of experience constructing annotated bibliographies and other writing assignments designed to help generate further questions and insights into research papers, I’ve never before tried (or, for that matter, heard of) the exploratory essay as “an intermediate stage in the research process.” After playing Elbow’s “believing and doubting game” in class earlier this week, I’m tempted to explore this (for me, at least) new form of writing in terms of believing and doubting.

I’m intrigued by The Allen and Bacon Guide’s claim that exploratory writing is designed “to keep a problem alive through consideration of multiple solutions or points of view,” because I feel like this strategy will be particularly handy as, throughout grad school, I will need to return to previously written seminar papers as I prepare articles for publication. If I engage in exploratory writing, I will be able to revisit not only my initial notes and final draft, but also the many angles on the topic that I found interesting as I got further into my research. What an invaluable resource this could be!

I am not without reservations, though; I still find Boice’s advice to “wait” before writing challenging because it has never been a big part of my writing process before now; what if adding this additional step to my writing process ends up disrupting a process that, at least to this point, has seemed pretty effective? What if I end up devoting more time to my writing—valuable time that I could have spent preparing for other courses—without any noticeable difference in the end product? I’m hopeful that, after we experiment with exploratory writing in this class, I’ll have a better idea of how best to incorporate this new strategy into my own writing process, and will know which side of Elbow’s game I’d like to run with.