Drafting Theses with the Six Journalistic Questions

In other posts, I've discussed the relationship between the 6JQ and theses. Basically, once you've identified your criteria with the 6JQ, you can use them to put together a thesis statement. Rather than go into detail about this concept here, I want to give a few examples, pulling from different posts, altered slightly. I'll be using different colors to distinguish between each criteria in the list and in its corresponding thesis.

From “Genre and Purposeful Theses”:

• Who: High school students, American authors with different cultural backgrounds
• What: Multi-cultural, American literature, The English Literary Canon
• When: High School years
• Where: American high school literature courses
• How: Studying multi-cultural literature
• Why: To gain a better understanding of other cultures

Thesis:

High school students who study literature by American authors from different cultures in their literature courses gain a better understanding and appreciation of the complexities.

Notice there can be overlap: “High school” applies to both Who and When. The same for “from different cultures,” just with the Who and How.

From the same post:

The local school district should use high school literature classes to improve young people’s understanding of different cultures by having students read books written by authors of different backgrounds, in addition to the English canon.

Here, the local school district is not colored, because, in this situation, it is not a “Who” or a “What”, but an audience.

And, another from the same post:

From my high school literature classes, I gained a greater understanding of different cultures  than I would have just by reading from the English canon.

From “Specificity and the 6 Journalistic Questions”:

• Who: The Irish
• What: Potatoes, Immigration, the Potato Blight
• When: 1840's & 50's
• Where: Ireland
• How: Potato Blight’s Spread
• Why: Monoculture

A potential thesis:

Reliance on monoculture in 1840's and 50's Ireland made it easy for the Potato Blight to wipe out crops, driving many Irish to immigrate.

A different thesis:

The Potato Blight in 1840's and 50's Ireland stemmed from monocultured crops, which made it easy for the Blight to spread.

In this situation, the ideas of the Blight spreading would be a “How” because it's dealing not just with the Blight itself, but how the Blight worked, and so would need to be added to the 6JQ criteria.

From “Quantity and Specificity: Getting a lot, and the most, out of the Six Journalistic questions”:

• Who: Bullied students
• What: Specific uniforms, business casual uniforms, bullying
• When: Last 15 years.
• Where: High schools in California
• How: Relationship of bullying to types of uniforms
• Why: Impact of uniforms on bullying

Thesis:

By looking at reports of bullying at high schools in California over the last 15 years, this essay will explore the impact different types of uniforms, such as specific uniforms traditionally worn by private and religious affiliated institutions; and more casual, open styles of uniforms, have had on bullying and bullied students.

Note some parts of this are not in the 6JQ, but rather explain how this potential essay would work. Remember how you're doing your project and the “How” in the 6JQ are different.

And, here at the end, a few pointers:

• If you need to expand your criteria based on the form the thesis takes, do so. Just keep track of both and make sure they line up so your thesis, and by extension the essay, don't get broad, vague, or tangential. In short, be flexible, but consistent.
• It is okay if one term or phrase covers multiple criteria.
• You do not need something in every criteria. If you find yourself forcing criteria into a thesis, it might be better to drop the criteria.
• Don't forget about Genre. While you can take most any set of criteria and use them for different genres, you can't force a genre to work with your criteria, only alter the criteria and thesis to fit the genre.
• The same can be said for Stasis: a Policy level Thesis will combine the criteria in a different way than a Value or Definition level thesis.

To wrap this up, I want to say that drafting theses is hard, but it doesn't have to be. All it is is summarizing your entire essay in a sentence or two, and with the Six Journalistic Questions, you can take this seemingly insurmountable task, and make it quite simple.

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Reasons and Processes: Identify How and Why in the Six Journalistic Questions

Four of the Six Journalistic Questions are straightforward. We identify people, places, times, concepts, objects, etc., but How and Why are more abstract. Sometimes students erroneously assume How and Why ask how they're going to research or write their essays, and why it's something worth writing about, but that gets away from the topic and into the writing of the essay. The Six Journalistic Questions are to help you focus on your topic, not the ins and outs of your process, and asking How and Why are integral to that.

At their core, How and Why ask about processes and reasons: How does something work, what goes into it to make it function, and Why does something work or happen, what's the causes of the issue, or even why is it an issue? So looking for the How and Why when drafting criteria asks about the underlying processes and reasons behind your topic. In this regard, they can be considered the most important of the six.

Here are some tips and recommendations for figuring out the How and Why.

What's the underlying issue? We tend to approach and deal with topics because there's some kind of issue with them, and asking How or Why requires digging deeper to think about it. It's what's at the core of your topic.

• Example: School bullying
• Why: Bullying causes physical and emotional trauma to children during important developmental years.
• How: Students who are bullied develop worse self esteem and trust issues, and perform worse in school and socially.

What do your criteria have to do with one another? Sometimes, answering How and Why means asking what everything else you've identified has to do with one another. This means there may be repetition, but you're not just reiterating the same thing: you're juxtaposing your criteria to figure out why it's significant to bring these criteria together.

• Example: Exercise for weight loss
• What: Weight loss; cardio vs. weight lifting
• When: Morning vs. afternoon
• How: The impacts different types of exercise have at different times of the day.
• While it doesn't explicitly state them, when the How says “different types of exercise” the What is implied, and the same for “morning vs. afternoon” and “different times of the day.

What's your perspective? The way you address the How and Why can shape your perspective on the topic and the rest of your criteria. The Who, What, When, and Where are just a collection of nouns you're bringing together, whereas the How and the Why help make them significant and related.

• Example: State Lotteries
• Why: (1) Helps fund education. (2) Winners usually end up worse off than they were before. (3) Promotes dangerous, wasteful gambling addictions.
• 1: This highlights a beneficial side of state run lotteries: their proceeds go to fund state schools.
• 2: This one takes a more negative approach to the lottery, targeting an unfortunate consequence associated with it. This doesn't condemn the lottery, but doesn't aggrandize it either.
• 3: This one takes a much more negative approach and outright condemns state lotteries.

It is possible to have more than one “Why” or “How.” In this situation, any combination of these could be used to consider different sides of the issue or try to find a reconciliation, rather than being one-sided on the issue.

Each of these examples can seem either straightforward, too simple, or obvious based on the topic. The thing is, there's nothing wrong with that. The 6JQ are supposed to help you get to the point. If you can articulate aspects of your topic in fewer words and as succinctly as possible, the better off you'll be, and just because something is obvious to you doesn't mean it'll be obvious to everyone else. The 6JQ aren't just a brainstorming and drafting tool; they can be a useful tool to help you stay on track, but if you're vague or broad, or off base entirely, then they're not going to help.

Quantity and Specificity: Getting a lot, and the most, out of the Six Journalistic Questions

The Six Journalistic Questions are a useful tool to identify the criteria of an essay: the topics and ideas you're focusing on. However, it's easy to just plod through these six questions and throw down the first responses that come to mind. This approach can only go so far, and actually undermines its usefulness. It makes the 6JQ more of an annoyance, busy work, than a useful tool.

How do you get more out of them? Simple: identify more criteria. Don't just write something down. Write everything down.

For example, for an essay about school uniforms. It would be easy to simply shoot out something like this:

• Who: Students
• What: Uniforms
• Where: America
• When: Now
• Why: Uniforms don't do any good.
• How: Requiring students to wear uniforms

There's an essay in there, but it's not a good one. The problem is every term here is vague, which defeats the purpose of using the 6JQ: this doesn't get any more specific or narrow down the topic. For example, when I was in middle school, we had “uniforms”, but it was basically a dress code mandating business casual attire: slacks, dress and a polo shirts, and girls could wear skirts. I have a friend who went to catholic school and described her uniforms as black tartan skirts and jumpers, with navy blue trousers and sweaters over white polo shirts. If we thought our business casual was bad, my friend's uniforms would have been torturous. Both of these are “uniforms”, but very different uniforms.

The solution to vague criteria is to move beyond the first responses and put down every possible response. This means taking those quick responses and breaking them down into as many variations as possible.

So let's break this down. First, Who: what types of students are you concerned about? Are there other people involved in this issue? What: What types of uniforms? What: other issues can uniforms impact? When: Specific grades or ages? Or are you looking at the history of school uniforms in the 1960's and 70's? And then there's Where: saying “America” is almost as bad as saying “Everyone,” and should either be dropped or made more specific: is this an issue to be addressed on a state level, city, district, or school? Or is this an issue for private schools?

Just by asking more direct questions and breaking down the 6JQ, you can turn the broad and vague criteria into a series of specific criteria:

• Who: Students – Elementary, middle, high school, private school, problem students, bullied students, bullies, bystanders of bullying, student-athletes, non-athletes. Parents – of any of the aforementioned. Administrators – teachers, principals, district administrators.
• What: Uniforms: business casual uniforms vs. specific uniforms; team uniforms; cost and availability. Student performance and behavior: bullying, grades, classroom disruptions, fights, cliques. School programs: athletics, clubs. Student performance, grades; classroom disruptions.
• Where: America – State level, city level, school district, individual schools, private schools, religious schools.
• When: Last 10 years; last 20 years; the 1990's, 1970-1990, etc.
• Why: Bad: Uniforms are uncomfortable; limit individuality and creativity; increase expenses for students; doesn't eliminate social issues like bullying. Still highlights class differences. Good: cut down on bad behavior, improved grades and student performance.
• How: Requiring students wear uniforms; allowing exceptions; allowing “casual/uniform-free days”.

These are just some criteria that stem from the issue of school uniforms. Given enough time and space, this could just go on and on. The important thing is everything on this list and everything that could be put on it can relate back to school uniforms. This means to simply say “I'm writing about school uniforms” it implies all of that and more.

The next step is to cut back to just a few criteria. Rather than finding broad terms to encompass a few terms at once (this would be undoing everything you just did), stick with the specific criteria and omit everything else. For example:

• Who: Bullied students
• What: Specific uniforms, business casual uniforms
• Where: High schools in California
• When: Last 15 years.
• Why: Impact of uniforms on bullying
• How: Relationship of bullying to types of uniforms

This then makes the 6JQ not just a matter of what you're going to write about but what you aren't. Once you've identified a few dozen potential criteria, you can focus on just a few, resulting in something like this, which looks at the relationship between bullying and types of uniforms in high school over the last 15 years across the state of California. The result is a streamlined set of criteria that is specific, which, when well handled, will result in an essay that is clear and direct. There's a lot of information it won't cover, but greater detail is preferable to broad information. This is much better than writing a treatise on everything related to school uniforms.

“Who: Everyone!”: Misusing the Six Journalistic Questions

Here is my opening metaphor: you're at a restaurant. As you are led to your table, you see all of the food everyone else is eating. You don't know the names of the different meals, nor what are appetizers, entrees, or even desserts. It's all food. And it all looks good. So when the waiter hands you a menu, you don't thank them and look for something you want. You simply respond by saying you want everything. Every salad, every soup, every steak, ever sandwich, every pasta, every drink, every desert, every appetizer, every special. 

This is what happens when you are establishing criteria using the Six Journalistic Questions and use the words “every” or “all” or even anything all-inclusive like “Americans” and “parents”. It's misusing a tool by not using it for its specific purpose. Anytime you say, “Who am I writing about? Well, everyone of course” you make serious assumptions that neglect aspects of humanity.

Saying “Everyone” takes every single possible permutation of human demographics and lumps them all together. It's trusting that all of humanity has the same perspectives, backgrounds, histories, cultures, economic statuses, medical conditions, blood types, diet habits, political affiliation, religious beliefs, living conditions, education levels, etc. It's a claim that everyone is the same. As one of my students once said, “it includes the babies in India.” I'll expand this to say it includes the babies that were in India thousands of years ago. Everyone means everyone is alive, will be alive, and has been alive.

The purpose of the six journalistic questions is to avoid these kinds of fallacious decisions by providing a means to make distinctions between criteria and narrowing one's focus. Going through the Six Journalistic Questions’ process is not a slapdash matter: it requires serious consideration.

There are two solutions to this. The first is to recognize you may not need a “who” as part of your Six Journalistic Questions. Not every criteria has to be filled and forcing criteria in can do more harm than good. When a physicist researches and writes about physics principles, they're not concerned with groups of people or demographics, so they wouldn't have any.

The second is the most important and goes back to what the Six Journalistic Questions are for in the first place: asking who does this involve. In these situations, it would be wise to put “who” on hold and go over the other criteria. Once the what, where, when, how, and why are filled, it can be easier to go back and determine if you even need a “who” and look at it in the light of the rest of your criteria.

There are, however, issues that do involve humans, but not demographics. These deal with issues like health, nutrition, education, safety, etc.. I've never seen a Nutrition facts label divided up by demographic or economic level. In these situations, as counterintuitive it may be, there still is not a “who.” This is because the focus of such studies is on the efficacy or validity of certain things.

There are issues, like medical conditions, that can require differentiation. For example, if you're writing about diabetics, “Diabetics” will appear in the “Who,” and if you're dealing with a control group, you'd also have “not diabetics.” But for a health oriented study looking at diabetes, this works because you've singled it down to specific criteria and other “who” may or may not factor in. Good guidelines for one diabetic generally will be good for another. There are of course other ways to focus the study, like looking at how diabetes appears and affects people of different racial backgrounds, but not ever study of diabetes needs to take that course. Odds are, if it is something affecting people in general, you don't need to specify a “who.”

I chose to focus on “who” for this post because it seems to be the main offender, but the same issue can appear anywhere else in the Six Journalistic Questions. Don't make hasty generalizations about the breadth of your topic or misunderstand the purpose of this tool. Like anything, it can be misused. The final piece of advice on this matter is take your time, ask yourself questions, and use this to narrow it down. It isn't a matter of checking off boxes: it’s a matter of refining your writing.

Don't sink too deep: Inappropriate Topics

When I first started teaching composition as a graduate student, some of my colleagues openly encouraged their students to write about sensitive, controversial issues: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc... Others forbade students from addressing these topics. It seems standard composition teachers will go one way or the other. On the surface, this can seem like the instructor's bias: they don't want to get a lot of essays that disagree with their own personal beliefs or opinions, or they have an agenda they want to push. While I'm sure there are instructors that do take such an approach, there are more practical reasons for restricting available topics.

For example, a student of mine once proposed writing about No Child Left Behind. Granted this isn't as sensitive a topic as those listed above, but it's still significant. I emailed the student saying if they were to write about No Child Left Behind, they would need to start by reading the law itself. I provided a link to the 670 page document.

And No Child Left Behind is just a simple example. Doing gun control, abortion, or gay marriage would require careful analysis of decades of legislation, court cases; and then accompanying sociological, psychological, biological, and chemical research, before diving into the world of ethics. To complicate matters, the myriad of opinion pieces on such topics found in newspapers, magazines, and blogs are highly subjective and therefore questionable, resulting in a continuation of Confirmation Bias on any side of the issue. So, properly addressing one of these topics would require hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of research; not all of it reliable, spanning decades of both primary and secondary sources, to be in a situation to authoritatively say something about it. Not many freshmen feel like putting that much effort into three pages.

When you consider the scope of research, this actually broadens inappropriate topics into less controversial areas, like childhood obesity and organic farming, and even more mundane, less controversial areas. Let me share one of my favorite examples. A colleague of mine said that a student of hers wanted to prove who Jack the Ripper was... in a freshman composition course. At the end of the semester but before the final essays were due, my colleague said she asked the student who Jack the Ripper was. The student hadn't come to a conclusion.

Personally, I’m not a criminologist, but I don't think there's a branch of anything that hasn't contributed something to the resolution of this Victorian murder mystery. Psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, even literature has offered conjectures. There have been hundreds of books on the matter, and, I'm sure, many more articles, all of it ranging from the fanciful to the serious. To definitively prove the identity of Jack the Ripper in a matter of weeks would be to try and do what hundreds or thousands of experts have tried to do for more than a century.

Whether or not a topic is or is not appropriate should be determined by the structure of the class. Some topics, because of their scope and the research it would take to handle them, go far beyond the demands of a general education composition course. Education should be challenging and students should rise to that challenge, but it can be far too easy to get yourself in too deep.

I want my students to push and challenge themselves. I want them to branch out, learn, and grow; but my students are college undergraduates taking a course that is designed to give them writing tools for other courses. Many haven't settled on what to major in and are taking three or four courses in addition to mine, as well as their own social lives, jobs, and family obligations. I want to challenge my students; not set them up for failure.

Returning to my colleagues who encouraged students to write about controversial issues. After a year of teaching, pretty much all of them had changed their tune: they forbid their students from such topics. They hadn't undergone a moral or ethical change, but they had a better understanding of what their students could handle.

Genre and Purposeful Theses

The form of a thesis varies depending on the genre and the purpose of the piece of writing. Different forms of writing have different conventions and much of the time we pick a genre to serve a specific purpose, or a teacher assigns a specific genre because there's a form students need to learn. These conventions and our own purposes dictate how we will write the essay and the thesis.

In other posts on the Six Journalistic Questions, I addressed how they can be used for developing a thesis and selecting a topic. For example, let’s say your six journalistic questions map out like this:

• Who: High school students, American authors with different cultural backgrounds
• What: Multi-cultural, American literature
• When: High School years
• Where: American high school literature courses
• How: Studying multi-cultural literature
• Why: To gain a better understanding of other cultures

This establishes criteria to focus on. Your essay should address these topics in detail and nothing else.

The next issue is what genre you’re writing in. A few examples include: 

• Persuasive essays are aimed at specific audiences with the intention to change something. They outline the issue and give reasons why it needs to change or improve, as well as specifying steps that should be taken to make the change happen. Theses for persuasive essays identify who needs to do what.
• Personal essays are introspective and may involve reflecting on past experience and interpreting it. Most of all personal essays talk about and explore and explain who you are: your beliefs, convictions, and practices. Theses for personal essays identify what was gained or learned from the experience.
• Academic research essays gather information from a variety of credible sources and involve some primary research as well. Most writing done in schools is this kind. Theses for academic research essays focus on a significant fact or detail and use the research to support and substantiate it.

The issue is then how to take that criteria identified in the Six Journalistic Questions and phrase them in a single sentence that matches the functions of the appropriate genres. For example:

• A persuasive essay might say “The local school district should use high school literature classes as a way to improve young people’s understanding of different cultures that exist within America by having students read books written by authors of different backgrounds, in addition to the English canon.”
• A personal essay won't do that, but instead will look more like, “From my high school literature classes, I gained a greater understanding of different cultures that exist within the United States than I would have just by reading from the English canon.”
• Or an academic research essay: “High school students who read literature by American authors from different cultures gain a better understanding and appreciation of the complexities within their country.”

The different genres will change the approach. In neither the persuasive not the research essays will the author address themselves, and instead the focus is on the subject matter. In a personal essay, first person is acceptable because the author is part of the subject. Similarly, the persuasive essay is much more concerned with the audience than the others are: a persuasive essay needs to be directed at a specific audience. However, academic essays are prepared for conferences or publications intended for experts in a scholarly field; personal essays may have a broader audience yet.

Understanding the demands of the genre is an important way to properly assemble your information and prepare to write about it. It gives you a way to structure and understand your purposes, and therefore, what goes into the thesis as well. It isn’t enough to simply gather your topics into a sentence: they have to point the reader in a specific direction.

Beware the Split Thesis

I panic a little when I see words and phrases like “and” and “as well as” in thesis statements.

I say a little because there are plenty of acceptable ways to use these in a thesis, but there are also examples that amount to “This essay is about Topic A... and it's also about Topic B.” Consider the following:

This essay will analyze the breeding practices and training techniques of bichon frises and golden retrievers.

This is a split thesis. The difference here is there isn't anything to suggest why these two things, joined by the “and” are being brought together: What do breeding practices and training have to do with one another? Why these dogs? Why not throw the dog's diet and health problems in there, too? What about corgis and papillons, or poodles and labradors?

Tangential Topics

I think this problem stems from writers having a few related topics but never developing a significant correlation between them. They go through the brainstorming steps, the six journalistic questions, mind mapping, etc, and figure out their overall topic and the subtopics for their essays. In doing so, they find a couple of things they want to address, without exploring a reason to do both. A stronger thesis would be

Different breeds of dog require different training techniques; a hunting dog, like a golden retriever, will need a different training regimen than a smaller lap dog, like a bichon frise.

Note that the topics didn’t change, but it's no longer a thesis about training and breeding golden retrievers and bichon frises. Now it's a thesis that compares and contrasts training techniques for broader types of dogs.

Just because two topics are remotely related does not mean it is appropriate to write about both in the same essay. After all, the more specific you are, the further apart your different topics can become. Sometimes, you do need to broaden your topic.

Broadening to Consolidating

This does not mean you can take step after step back until you have “Dogs are interesting” as a thesis. Instead, it means recognizing you can get so specific you can't reconcile your different topics and you're left with a thesis that lists specific topics, and two essays pieced, Frankenstein-style, into one another.

Broadening happens so you can bring together similarities (or contrast differences) to specify your topic. If you're writing about dog training and dog breeding, you're writing about two broad topics. If you're writing about how to train dogs based on their different breeds, it’s probably going to be a single, solid essay. The reason for this is because you're not writing about these two topics, but instead the ways they intersect.

Just as this issue can stem from using certain words in the thesis, it can be solved by introducing other words. For example, saying you are going to compare and contrast suggests you are going to identify similarities and differences and come to a conclusion that weighs both topics against one another. Switching conjunctions can change the overall meaning: However suggests the relationship you’re identifying is based on a shift in ideas or expectations. Therefore suggests a causal relationship because one thing is one way, and the other thing directly correlates.

Conclusion

This is not to say that switching one set of conjunctions with another will solve your problems, nor is it to say that having “and” in a thesis will guarantee a bad thesis and “therefore” will guarantee a good one. The words we choose convey a lot of meaning no matter where they show up, but especially in a thesis.

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Works Cited

"AG Cody" by Rocktendo - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AG_Cody.jpg#/media/File:AG_Cody.jpg

"Golden retriever dummytraining" by Dirk Vorderstraße - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg#/media/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg

"PembrokeWelshCorgi Tryst.fullres". Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg#/media/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg

Take a Thesis along

Think of a swamp. A noisome mass of life and liquid you'd rather not deal with. You'll probably want to get out as quickly as possible. If you forge ahead, then you have to hold your breath and try your luck. And there's nothing to let you know where you should be going.

That's an essay without a thesis: an entanglement of information that may be beneficial but it isn't clear how. Without something to indicate how to get through the quagmire, you'll end up lost and confused. A well crafted thesis in a well written introduction will give a piece of writing purpose and make it comprehensible for your reader.

"Cypresses"

A thesis is a one (or two) sentence statement of what you are trying to do in your essay. Drafting these sentences forces you to identify the relationship between your topics: how they influence one another, refine your overall topic, and what significant thing you have to say that brings everything together. You have to think about the entire essay and what conclusions you make and what your purpose is in writing the essay. This sounds like a daunting task, but if you use the six journalistic questions to sort out and clarify what you’re writing about, drafting a thesis and adhering to it can be much easier.

My other posts on the six journalistic questions deal with amassing ideas, but you need to figure out how and why you are bringing them all together for a thesis. For example, you may say you are interested in silent film and in pharmaceuticals. Two valid topics with nothing to do with one another (at least no connection I can figure out). Writing a thesis forces you to take these different things and explain, in about as succinct a way as possible, what they have to do with one another

The thesis gives you a way to make your responses to the Six Journalistic Questions more pertinent and interconnected as you say you are going to “compare and contrast this and that,” or “demonstrate how this can help resolve such and such an issue.” That lets the reader know what you are writing about, but also how you are using the information.

A thesis lets the reader know what to expect from the essay: what information you are dealing with and how you are dealing with it. It can be easy to slosh from paragraph to paragraph, but then you're leading your reader through an information quagmire. Make sure you have refined your topic and that your thesis shows up early and clearly enough that, no matter how messy the essay may be, there's something to give it purpose.

"Saltpancrk12"

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Works Cited

"Cypresses". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cypresses.jpg#/media/File:Cypresses.jpg

"Saltpancrk12" by Adam.J.W.C. - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg#/media/File:Saltpancrk12.jpg

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 2

Last week, I posted about how using grandiose statements like “mankind,” “humanity,” and “the dawn of time” can severely hurt a piece of writing. This week, I am posting about how doing this can hurt your appearance as a writer.

Taking it Seriously

Sometimes we encounter broad, vague statements in advertisements or editorials. These aren't serious research pieces; they rely on exaggeration and hyperbole to get an audience reaction as fast as possible. We're willing to give these situations some breathing room because they're not providing solid and conclusive facts: these genres have other motives.

Research is serious. We can forgive an advertiser peddling a product, and we can forgive a hastily written piece driven more by subjectivity than objectivity. But when it comes down to serious research and learning the finer nuances of major social or academic issues, there's none of that subjective breathing room. Serious research is a time for specificity and concrete research to back it up.

Poor Research

If you're trying to talk about how something has been a certain way since “time immemorial” then there is missing research. This is particularly interesting when I get essays on topics like dentistry or computers: stuff that, however primitive it may have been in its inception, had some beginning in recorded history.

Just think how that sounds. “Mankind has exhibited an irrational fear of dentists for all time.” Or even worse, “Man has eaten bread since the dawn of time.”

Some topics, like food, are extremely old. I think it's safe to say earliest man, in whatever form, consumed something for sustenance, but a lot had to happen before bread. But if I were to start making claims about frequency of meals, dieting habits, or the nature of hunting, gathering, and the shift to agriculture that allowed for bread, I had better have access to the studies on skeletal remains of these ancient humans, the test results showing the composition of the remains, and at least a dozen other broad fields of knowledge that I'm unaware of because I haven't and don't study prehistoric man and his lifestyle habits.

False Authority

Returning to Professor Jared Diamond and issues of authority. It takes a lot of time, research, and devotion to any discipline to be able to authoritatively discuss it, let alone its entire history. Such experts are also familiar enough with their disciplines to be able to affix more specific details in terms of time, place, and the demographics in question. They know it’s never as simple as “all of human history” and will demonstrate that knowledge in their writing.

This means that, while it may sound authoritative to express a history-spanning knowledge of something, it actually shows you do not have a solid enough base of information to understand the discipline is complex. It also degrades the work of professional researchers like Dr. Jared Diamond who devote their lives to their fields. It degrades your presentation by suggesting you haven’t done sufficient research. It degrades yourself because it shows you don't take it seriously enough to be talking about it in the first place, and you rely on cliches and cheap rhetoric to defend your ideas more than concrete evidence. It is a presentation of false authority and disrespects those who can address it authoritatively.

Conclusion

Be respectful of your discipline and researched subject matter. Recognize and understand whatever you are researching is far more complex than you think it is, and a failure to recognize that complexity shows a failure as a researcher and as a writer. It may seem like a good idea to bolster a piece of writing with hyperbole and all-encompassing statements, but relying on them will do more to harm to your credibility as a writer than it will ever help you.

You Aren’t Qualified to Talk About “Mankind”, Part 1

I want to start this post off by talking about a man named Jared Diamond. 

Dr. Diamond earned his PhD at Cambridge and is a professor of geography at UCLA. He is perhaps most famous for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wherein he postulates how Europeans were able to colonize the extent they did because of issued based on agriculture. It’s a fascinating book and interesting premise based on thirty years of research done after Diamond was a PhD carrying professor.

I bring this up not to discuss Professor Diamond’s premise or conclusions, but to address how he is one of very few individuals who has earned the privilege to talk about “mankind”. Compare it to Albert Einstein or Dr. Stephen Hawking talking about “time.” Being able to talk about monumental ideas represents the accumulation of years of research, education, and training. These people are in positions of authority to address topics normally beyond the reach of some professional scholars, let alone newcomers.

And yet, people say and write cliches like “man has always” and “since the dawn of time” on a regular basis. The simple fact is they shouldn’t. This stems back to what I wrote last week about making unqualified or broad claims. If you say something about “time immemorial” or how “humanity has always” you need a lot of math, artifacts, or research to substantiate it. And that's just the start.

Introductions and Impossible Expectations

I tell my students an introduction is a promise to the reader. In so many words, you give a brief but precise overview of the key subjects that will be addressed, culminating in the thesis. From there, a reader trusts what is in the introduction will be addressed in the essay. So, when a writer mentions “humanity,”it creates an expectation “humanity” is going to be one of the guiding topics of the essay.

Most research essays I assign students are three to six double spaced pages, and that isn’t enough space to write anything conclusive or argumentative about the expanse that is “humanity.” Once my students drop the cliche, they move on and get closer to their topic, never again returning to issues regarding “humanity”. They have set up an impossible expectation for themselves, especially when the topic of the essay is not on mankind or time, but is rather on more basic issues, like shoes.

Everything is Relevant

The only excuse I can think of to introduce “time immemorial” into an essay is a fancy way to lazily say “I can write about anything and it’ll work,” as if to claim there is no way to run out of stuff to write about. For example, an essay on “The History of Music” could start off with assumptions about prehistoric man banging sticks together, and then move to a discussion of representations of music in the middle ages, before discussing Bach, the Beatles, and Beck.

This is not an essay I have received, but just thinking about it makes me cringe.

The problem is, when you give yourself such a wide breadth as “the history of music” you will end up saying, at best, a few unrelated things about tangentially related topics. This will lead to an essay bereft of thesis, organization, and coherence. Maybe you could draw significant connections between medieval music, Bach, the Beatles, and Beck, but if you did, you won’t be writing about the history of music. You’ll be writing about the connections between them.

Conclusion

This is just a start of the reasons why using such all-encompassing hyperbolic statements are bad when structuring and writing your piece, but there’s more to it than that. It also makes you look bad as a writer and researcher.

More on that next week.

From Hypothesis to Thesis

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
         - Sherlock Holmes, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (189)

When you set out to research something, hopefully you already have some basic understanding, some background in the field. With that background, you should have an idea of what specific topics you are interested in, and an understanding of how things work in that field. Therefore, you can hypothesize and make reasonable assumptions about how you think the research is going to end and what your eventual thesis will be.

There's a problem, though. Sometimes, the tendency is to find research that supports a hypothesis, rather than research for the sake of learning and becoming more knowledgeable about the topic. Research is learning, and learning is gaining a better understanding of something. That information you already knew becomes more refined and more specific. Therefore, your hypothesis, which will become your thesis, should change.

There are really two ways that your thesis can change: first, by becoming more specific and more nuanced, the second, is to qualify it to avoid expressing unfounded absolutes.

More nuanced, more specific

Part of what happens in research is you become more aware of the complexities of your subject, especially if you realize the subject you started researching is really two, or three, or a dozen different topics. Be careful you don’t try to address additional topics that aren’t essential to your topic, or that will make your topic too broad and vague.

For example, you may want to write and research the middle ages. A little research should show there are thousands of facts relevant to the middle ages. You'll learn that situations varied considerably from century to century, from place to place, across social strata, etc.. It then becomes dangerous to say something about “the middle ages” because it won't be the same everywhere. You then have to focus your research on a specific place, a specific time, a specific social class, etc. It then becomes a matter of filling in the Six Journalistic Questions and returning to that tool as a way to refine and limit one's topic so that it doesn't get out of hand.

Becoming Qualified

We like to think in absolutes, but the world is rarely so easily distinguishable into black and white. For example, maybe you hypothesized “all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king,” then any British nobles who weren’t loyal to their king would disprove your thesis (for this example, you don't need to look much further than the Magna Carta to disprove it, but, to be fair, King John was a jerk). You can then qualify your thesis by replacing the “all” with words like “Most” or “some” or “few.”

This little change, though, will have repercussions in the rest of the essay:

If it’s “all” then all of your evidence should show that, yes indeed, all medieval British nobles were faithful and loyal to their king. No exceptions.

If it’s “most” then you should have evidence showing the majority were loyal while acknowledging that some weren’t.

“Some” and, more specifically, “few” suggest most were not loyal to the crown, and so most examples you reference should show disloyalty among medieval British nobles.

Conclusion

Whatever the path you take as you research, your hypothesis should undergo changes, becoming more nuanced, more specific, and, if needs be, qualified, as you go through your research. Use your hypothesis as a way to gauge the effectiveness of your research. If your thesis doesn't change, then odds are you aren't paying enough attention to your research.

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Works Cited

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003. 187-205. Print.

Specificity and the 6 Journalistic Questions

If you’re not clear on what the Six Journalistic Questions are, read a previous post on them here.

I had a very interesting conversation with a student. He was worried because he had done his research, written his essay, followed the six journalistic questions, but he didn't have a Who.

I asked him a few questions looked at his draft and concluded he didn't need one. His essay was about local farming and agriculture - the where and the what. The When was contemporary, present day. The how and why were in there too, and it just so happened he was able to put it all together without writing about any kind of demographic.

There's no rule accompanying the six journalistic questions stating you have to have at least one answer for each question. Sometimes having a response to each comes naturally and sometimes it just doesn't matter, like my student’s contemporary When. On the other hand, it is possible to have several responses for each item.

I get two responses to this approach: the first is  is it easier to pick one or two topics and write about them? The second is how can a piece still be specific and write about so many different things?

Let me return to the student's essay to resolve this.

He had a what: potato farming. Seems innocuous enough, but if I had a student come to me and say they wanted to write about potato farming, a few things cross my mind:

Potatoes are originally from South America, and there’s  a huge variety grown in the Andes in particular.

The Great Potato Famine(s) in Ireland that came from monoculture.

They're poisonous if improperly raised and picked.

French Fries and Sweet Potato French Fries.

Idaho’s Famous Potatoes.

Vodka, but wine from potatoes is poisonous.

It may seem easy to just write about potato farming, but potato farming includes the history of a continent, a mountain range, and a country, American and Russian culinary practices, agricultural practices, and health concerns. Now, an essay about how the Great Potato Famine came from monoculture would be possible. It limits it to:

Who? - The Irish

What? - Potatoes

When? - 1840's & 50's

Where? - Ireland

How? - Potato Blight

Why? - Monoculture

It could even be expanded if you wanted to deal with other issues by including Immigration into the what, and that would prompt the question: immigration to where? But you wouldn't include in this essay about how the great potato famine led to the mass migration of Irish peoples in the 1840's and 50's to the USA with a discussion about Russian Vodka or french fries. And if you did find a connection worth writing about, then do so.

A single subject is far too broad and leads from disparate topic to disparate topic. Conversely, by identifying a number of subjects and then looking at how they intersect, it can keep you from getting caught up in tangents to topics that are too big by letting you focus only on the interconnecting relationships.

Don't get just one, don't force a response for each one, and be flexible and willing to drop or add more on an as needs basis. Put them to good use, and the Six Journalistic Questions can help a lot.