Online education

Inquiry Paper The exploratory essay is an account of inquiry. Your goal is to share the experience of questioning your opinions and the arguments of others on your chosen topic. The paper will be a journey with a starting point, a tour of viewpoints on the issue, and a destination, a claim you can defend. The essay has three parts, one written before inquiry, the other two written after. In this informal paper, you will refer to yourself and your own thoughts and experiences. Write in first person. Here is an overview of the paper: In Part I, you will tell what question or issue interests you most about a given topic and express your initial opinion. Part II will be the exploration itself. The point is to open the question and keep it open, testing your opinions and exploring the issue through conversations and research that connect you to a range of expert opinions. You are not trying to support your initial opinion but to test it. You’ll write about readings that confirm and contradict your thinking and evaluate these arguments fairly. Part III, the conclusion, will be a statement of your thinking after the inquiry, an explanation of the truth as you now see it. Think of exploration as the process of arriving at a claim.