[the writing center]

Exploration Questions

My suggestions in the margins of student essays are not usually marching orders but something more akin to menu options. Most students need a lot of menu options, and they will be better off if they realize that the title of their essay will be a lot better if it is chosen from a list of five *possible* titles. And this goes for everything else about their essays. They sure could use some more exploration strategies. I think they are also called critical thinking strategies, but since critical thinking seems as if it is of a high order of intellectual development, and perhaps comes farther along in the essay-writing process than exploration, maybe exploration can be a good label for now.

A long time ago I used a book called *Four Worlds of Writing,* which I didn't even like. It recommended that student writers adopt, alternately, a static view, a dynamic view, and a relative view. Describe the object of your analysis (or the topic of your essay)—that was the first one, the static view. Touch it and listen to it and look inside of it, whether it is a logical problem or a painting. The dynamic view asked how it had changed over the years, or how you the student writer had changed with respect to it. The relative view asked what other things it was like.

We need guidelines and questions like this for generating ideas.  Probably you already have some favorites. Various writing texts do have their own. Sometimes they ask for a more complex analysis of causality. Does A cause B? Are you sure it’s not the other way around: B causes A? Or could it be a third thing, C, that causes both A and B? Or perhaps B just comes *after* A, and there is no connection. (Something to think about before you decide that wearing a watch causes heart attacks.) Another recipe for critical thinking that these books might ask for is a sorting out of a problem according to whether it partakes of idealistic/utopian behavior, on the one hand, or pragmatic behavior, on the other.

My favorite questions, when the assignment features reading, are as follows:

(1) Where have you found a problem in the text? (That does not mean a place in the text where you disagree, but a *knot* in the text, a place where you have mixed feelings, or cognitive dissonance, perhaps because it is getting you to believe something you don’t really want to believe.) What can you say about that passage?

(2) What assumptions does the writer make about readers’ values? That is, what indications can you find of the values that the writer believes that he or she shares with readers? Are those fair assumptions? What readers do those assumptions leave out of account?

(3) What is not in the reading that easily could have been, without making it a *totally* different reading?

The best exploratory questions are usually contained within the professor’s assignment, and that’s good, because good exploration questions might differ from assignment to assignment. They differ, but students might benefit from having a few favorite questions that they can go back to again and again.

Freewriting and Sprinting

That’s all I have to say about explorations, but I also want to include something here about freewriting, or sprinting. Most of my English 131 students can write 150 words in 5 minutes, easily. They can do this if I tell them not to lift their pens from the paper for five minutes (or not to stop typing), and if I say that they should just keep writing if they find themselves going off on a tangent. In fact, if they somehow start to tell a story (a story that has a time element to it, like “one day last week”), that’s a bonus; that’s just the kind of thing freewriting can be good for. Five-minute timed writing will not always work to provide insights and clarity. In fact, most rhetoric books that recommend it call it “looping,” and suggest that it is best if it is done repeatedly, so that your second five-minute sprint is based on what is most interesting about your *first* five-minute sprint, and so on. But let me assume that you may not be able to get students to work for 25 minutes on looping. Can they still benefit from 5 minutes of freewriting? I think so, and you might even be able to do it while you are reading their drafts. Think of the possibilities. They can write for 5 minutes on why this topic rather than some other came to them. Or they can write an alternate final paragraph for the essay they just handed you. Or they can try to write a story of their own that came into their mind while reading this story that was part of their assignment (keeping the pen moving the whole time, continuing, if they have to, with “I have nothing to say about this topic because ..”) Or they can write for five minutes about another political or social issue that has the same logical structure as the one they have written on. (For example, someone might point out that the same thing that she is saying about illegal sales of drugs might be said for bodily organs or for automatic weapons. Making something illegal spurs the growth of prohibited black markets.)

Do you think any of this would make the students’ essays better? I think the chances are very good that it would. And it will pull us away, a little bit, from sentence-level proofreading concerns, which have their limits, as I think you’ll agree.