By now, your project should be well underway. You've got a subject that genuinely interests you, and you've found a focus to guide your explorations. Now you need to begin systematically probing and exploring.

The discovery techniques discussed in Discovering What to Write should be helpful at this point. If you need some basic structure, see the suggestions in Organizing Your Writing. Find a comfortable balance between generating new ideas and fitting those ideas into an overall pattern. Branching trees and cluster maps can be help you spot major divisions and see how parts relate to the whole and to each other.

Find a comfortable balance between generating new ideas and fitting those ideas into an overall pattern.

If you need more information, you may want to research topic in the library or conduct some interviews or surveys. This is also a good time for more freewriting, focused now on specific subtopics identified in your organizational plan.

Imagine yourself exploring the problem of unconscious sexism in your workplace. You may be asking where these attitudes come from, who holds them, how the expression of sexism has changed over time, how this sexism manifests itself now, how it affects men, women, the overall atmosphere at work, the quality of work produced, how these attitudes can be exposed and overcome. You may be freewriting about your own experiences, interviewing co-workers and supervisors, researching literature on the causes and effects of discrimination.

You'll almost certainly sense a need for order and system to your inquiry. You may need to do some further clustering, make an informal outline, or simply list important sub points. Probably also, you'll be looking for some sort of closure, some destination, some end to your exploring. You may not be ready to formulate this into a clear thesis, but will likely be moving in that direction.

Rather than choosing a thesis immediately, you might try out a few possibilities so their strengths and weaknesses can be examined.

• Do you believe these sexist attitudes are so deeply ingrained by cultural conditioning and the structure of the work environment that you couldn't hope to counteract them?

Rather than choosing a thesis immediately, you might try out a few possibilities so their strengths and weaknesses can be examined.

• Do you feel that increased social awareness of gender bias may have created a climate in which concerned people can hope to change the status quo?
• What have you discovered in your inquiry that would lead you to favor one solution over another?

As such questions are answered, you should feel an emerging sense of certainty and satisfaction, a tentative recognition of closure.

To be sure, much work remains ahead, but if you shuttle back and forth between exploring and structuring, you should start to see a thesis emerging, and your should begin to see how that thesis can serve as an organizational and conceptual center for your essay.

Activity

7.6 During these probing and drafting stages, share your work to date with a partner. What you share will be rough and unfinished. You may have to do more than show your work; you may have to explain what you're trying to do and how you're going about it.