The Six Journalistic Questions

Sometimes known as the 6 W's or the 5 W's and an H. Just go with whatever helps you remember it, asking yourself these six questions can help improve your writing process.

One of the easiest ways to figure out what to put into a piece of writing is to list out your specific topics. But it can be difficult to know what exactly should be identified or how to identify it. Thankfully, the Six Journalistic Questions give cues as to what to look for:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

Ever since a colleague shared a simple powerpoint about these gems with me they have become integral to how I teach composition. They are useful in thesis development, research, organization, introductions, conclusions...or just about every where. Each one stands apart and helps a writer identify and connect every topic with every other topic, helps ensure each topic is addressed, that there aren’t any tangents, and makes a piece of writing more specific.

I'm wary to say there's a panacea for bad writing or for teaching composition, but this is the closest.

The responses to these questions can be broad or specific and sometimes just identifying them can help you see how broad or specific your topic is. Some elaboration:

Who – What person or group of people are you writing about?

This deals with demographics. This could focus on an individual, like a biography. It could be a broad political demographic like New Yorkers or an ethnic demographic like Caucasians, or any other way to group or organize people. I had one student who led me along for half the class thinking he was writing about red-headed people.

Note: This is not your audience. This is whom you are writing about. Not to whom you are writing.

What – What things, physical or intangible, are you writing about?

Think nouns. Are you writing about a chair, or about the moon? A specific chair, or chairs in general? This opens it up to whatever objects or concepts you want to, and not necessarily physical ones. I like to read about narrative. I can pick up books or movies, things that tell and represent narratives but, narrative is an intangible concept. Nevertheless, it still goes in here.

When – What time frame are you writing about?

This could be broad or specific. A Geologist will deal with millions of years at a single stretch when the chemist or physicist will look at events that transpire in seconds or even less. It’s about determining when in history to start and when to end. Depending on the discipline, this may not even be bound by history: the historian will assign years and the chemist will merely want to know how long something takes to happen.

Where – What place or places are you writing about?

This could be a geographic location, a cultural location, or a political location, or even some combination thereof. Like the rest, this can be broad or specific or anywhere in between. The head of a pin is a place and so is a building, a country, or the universe if we want to get really big.

The last two get interesting and help to bring the rest together.

How – Are you writing about how something works?

A lot of scientific research focuses on figuring out how things work and how things operate. How looks at the interactions among the other elements in the first four W's and explores what they have to do with one another and how they contribute and lead to something.

Why – To what end does something happen?

Sometimes it goes right alongside the how. We may know how something came to be, but why? This doesn't even have to be all philosophic, but can be the end result of a+b=c. It can identify a solution to a problem or the roots of a problem itself. Sometimes it's the easy question to answer. Sometimes it’s the hard one to ask.

In a way, any piece of writing, academic in particular, is really a matter asking how

Whether you start out sorting through these or pick them out of a piece you’ve already started to help you better formulate and structure it is up to you. But no matter when or how, give it a try and see how it stacks up.