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.

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.

Why The Page Count?

One page. Single Spaced. Times New Roman. 10 is the smallest font size. Half inch margins.

This is what stood out to me in a writing prompt I got in grad school. It was bizarre. It amounted to about 1000 or so words, which, for an English graduate student expected to spew an analysis every time they’re asked a question, is hard. Why write three pages when I could write five, or fifteen?

I encountered a similar issue as an instructor. Each essay was required to have a minimum number of pages. No students confronted me about it, but I'm sure they wondered why they needed to have an exact number of pages filled, then I started noticing something. Those that turned in shorter essays, even if it was just a half page or so short, never wrote as detailed as they were supposed to. There were also those that were long enough or longer that still rambled, but I cannot remember a single essay that came beneath the minimum and did everything that it was supposed to. I've even assigned essays that were too short – a horde of 3 page essays that were never quite up to par while the few 4 pages ones were. I'm not going to fault my students for a mistake that I made, but it taught me an interesting lesson: required page lengths are anything but arbitrary.

An experienced instructor will have a strong enough grasp of the requirements and expectations. They know how much writing will meet those requirements. I had another professor who required a 15 page essay. 14 wouldn't cut it. 16 was too long. The assignment had other parameters, but most of all, could we, as grad students, write an essay that met the research, intellectual, and structural requirements and keep it all within 15 pages. It was hard for me. Just like the one page, single spaced one mentioned above.

Reflecting on both these assignments, I learned the same lessons: be detailed enough to meet the rigor and detail required, and be economical enough to say it as clearly and succinctly as possible.

There are other factors that go into it as well, especially as you move into the professional world. Maybe a magazine or newspaper won't take your 10 page treatise because they only have 30 pages that they can fill and have a dozen contributors that they have to put in there. But then why 30 pages? Why not 40? Costs of printing, distribution, and storage can lead to that number. Somewhere in every major publishing house there's an accountant who knows by heart how much every page costs at every phase of production, distribution, and marketing.

For every page length specification given, there are numerous factors – educational, practical, financial – that were taken into consideration before that number was given. If 2 pages will do, you'll be assigned 2 pages. If the work requires 5 pages of material, and the research and exploration that it entails, then you'll be assigned 5 pages.

As a last note, don't expect meeting, or exceeding, the page length of any assignment will guarantee a great score. I've seen six pages when five were assigned and thought “You could have cut this down.” You can always fill pages with building slippage or even repeat yourself. The point isn't to fill the pages, after all: it is to express yourself as well as you can, in enough detail, and to a sufficient extent. Rarely is the page length truly the minimum: it's an optimum.