Exploratory essay is... a narration of the writeres thinking process while doing reserach.  The essay recounts you attempt to examine your questions complexity, explore alternatives and arrive at a solution or answer.
 
The essential motive for exploratory thinking and writing is to keep a problem alive through consideration of multiple solutions or points of view.
 
The key to effective writing is to create a tension between alternative views.  When you start out, you dont know where your thinking will end up; at the outset you might not have an alternative view.
 
Staments like "part of me thinks..., but another part thinks.." forces you to find something additional to say, writing becomes a process of inquiry and discovery.
 
Thinking here is DIALECTIC
-see the question as a genuine problem worth puzzling over
-consider alternative views and play them against eachother.
-look at specific examples and illustrations
-continues the thinking prcess in search of some sort of resolution or synthesis of alternative views
-incorporate the stages of dialectic process into the essay
 
At the beginning of the essay explain- why you are interested in this problem, why you think it is significant and why you have been unable to reach a satisfactory answer
 
Now write a first person chronologically organized narrative account of your thinking process as you investigate your question through research, talking with others and doing your own refelctive thinking
 
Your goal is to examine your questions, problem, is issue from a variety of perpectives, assesing the strengths and weaknesses of different positions and points of view.
 
YOUR GOAL IS NOT TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION BUT TO REPORT ON THE PROCESS OF WRESTLING WITH IT.  You are asked to dwell on the problem, not to solve it.  Your thinking may shift in the progress.  What matters is that you are actively engaged with your problem and demonstrate why it is problematic.
 
TOPIC- Do sports stars bear any responsibility for being "role models?"
No less than 2.5 pages