Kinds of question – 27
within a word limit and interesting as a piece of academic enquiry,
they need to be narrowed down and a particular perspective adopted
towards them. The best way to begin this process is to ask questions
of the subject, just as your tutors often do when they set essay topics.
To these kinds of question we now turn.
3
Kinds of question
An object, event, situation, concept or idea becomes an object of
enquiry because someone has raised an interesting or significant question about it. The object does not have to be a ‘new discovery’. It
might have lain around for years or centuries as a ‘fact’ or as part of
our accustomed intellectual furniture until the thought strikes a fresh
mind that there is about it an unresolved question with interesting
implications. Indeed, far from having to wait until a novel object is
brought in for study – like a fossilised skeleton from some previously
unknown dinosaur – it is by raising new questions about existing
objects of knowledge that we often uncover new objects whose existence was unknown.
Academic enquiry, as we have seen, proceeds in the first
instance by asking questions. Your essay topics are examples of these
questions. Just as your tutors ask questions of you by the essay
topics they set, so you must learn to ask questions both of the essay
topic itself and of the various books you use in your reading for the
essay. It is the answers to these questions which, when integrated in
a coherent fashion, become an essay. Skill in asking good questions
(a ‘good’ question is one which opens up a fruitful line of enquiry)
is something that comes with practice, knowledge and experience in
the disciplines you are studying. There is no method or formula for
coming up with really good questions. It is possible, nevertheless, that
by learning to ring the changes on the question words we use, various
lines of thought will be opened up and – an important consideration
for many of us – this will help overcome ‘writer’s block’. These
question words are ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’,
‘why’, ‘to what extent’, ‘how far’ and ‘which’.
within a word limit and interesting as a piece of academic enquiry,
they need to be narrowed down and a particular perspective adopted
towards them. The best way to begin this process is to ask questions
of the subject, just as your tutors often do when they set essay topics.
To these kinds of question we now turn.
3
Kinds of question
An object, event, situation, concept or idea becomes an object of
enquiry because someone has raised an interesting or significant question about it. The object does not have to be a ‘new discovery’. It
might have lain around for years or centuries as a ‘fact’ or as part of
our accustomed intellectual furniture until the thought strikes a fresh
mind that there is about it an unresolved question with interesting
implications. Indeed, far from having to wait until a novel object is
brought in for study – like a fossilised skeleton from some previously
unknown dinosaur – it is by raising new questions about existing
objects of knowledge that we often uncover new objects whose existence was unknown.
Academic enquiry, as we have seen, proceeds in the first
instance by asking questions. Your essay topics are examples of these
questions. Just as your tutors ask questions of you by the essay
topics they set, so you must learn to ask questions both of the essay
topic itself and of the various books you use in your reading for the
essay. It is the answers to these questions which, when integrated in
a coherent fashion, become an essay. Skill in asking good questions
(a ‘good’ question is one which opens up a fruitful line of enquiry)
is something that comes with practice, knowledge and experience in
the disciplines you are studying. There is no method or formula for
coming up with really good questions. It is possible, nevertheless, that
by learning to ring the changes on the question words we use, various
lines of thought will be opened up and – an important consideration
for many of us – this will help overcome ‘writer’s block’. These
question words are ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’,
‘why’, ‘to what extent’, ‘how far’ and ‘which’.