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.

Prop up that triangle with The Rhetorical Arch, Part 5: Pathos

Several years ago, I attended a conference where a friend of mine, an aerospace engineer, was presenting. I attended his presentation, only to be completely lost after two minutes.

Does this mean my friend gave a bad presentation? Hardly. He tailored his presentation for people with similar backgrounds and interests, namely, other aerospace engineers. Not English majors. He could have changed his presentation – the delivery – so someone with a background in literature would be able to follow along, but English majors wouldn't care as much as his fellow engineers would.

This is Pathos: audience awareness, or how a message is tailored for an audience. It isn't enough to just produce information: it's necessary to consider where it's going and to fit it for that audience. For example, you'd probably describe Breaking Bad to your immediate friends differently than you would to your grandmother. Good Pathos requires you consider the interests, expertise, and backgrounds of your audience, no matter how broad or specific your audience is. If they're experts, then you'll be safe using specialized terminology and referencing other experts. If your audience are not experts, you'd need to simplify or approach it from whatever discipline they are knowledgeable in.

That having been said, Pathos is not the same as your audience, and it's dangerous to think of pathos as appealing to your audience's emotions (even though this is how it's frequently taught). First, Pathos is not your audience any more than Ethos is synonymous with author: rhetoric is not concerned with authors and audiences, but how authors and audiences are addressed and presented.

Second, emotions. Emotion is part of Pathos, but there are problems with equating the two. Identifying Pathos with emotions blurs the line between carefully writing for your audience and making Appeals to Emotion or Pity fallacies. Claiming Pathos is the audience's emotions or focusing exclusively on their emotions oversimplifies people to whatever they love, pity, or hate; and in turn either praising, bemoaning, or demonizing the issue so they agree with you, regardless of your message or its validity.

Meanwhile, many arguments and pieces of writing are carefully tailored for distinct audiences without relying on strong emotions. For example, textbooks. Textbooks for high school and introductory college courses tend to be more colorful, broken up into brief sections, provide definitions in margins and glossaries, and offer questions for discussions or assignments. However, a textbook for a more advanced class, like one used in a graduate course will feature fewer colors or images, if any, and may or may not feature a glossary. And that's just the design: the graduate level textbook will likely have fewer sections, no built-in assignments, and longer chapters, even longer paragraphs and sentences.

The reason for the difference is simple: an introductory textbook is written for students new to the field or taking a general education course. Rather than bog students down with thick, dense information, the authors instead aim for a design that's more appeasing to the eye and easier to understand. The graduate level textbook, however, is intended for students and scholars, people deeply committed to the field: they don't need to be wooed by bright colors and designs. These are the readers who voluntarily go to these books for the information, not out of obligation, so there's no need to soften it with colors, pictures, and designs, nor to simplify the concepts.

Pathos, therefore, is a matter of emotions, but not what topics or issues the audience likes or loathes, it’s presenting the information in a way they will like, to garner their attention and help them retain knowledge. Pathos is more than compelling anecdotes or expressing outrage at a situation: it is the consideration of the language used throughout and how it is the best language for the intended audience.

Prop up that triangle with The Rhetorical Arch, Part 4: Logos

When dealing with Logos, you're dealing with the message in whatever is articulated. In short, you're asking whether or not an argument makes sense. But, what does it mean when something “makes sense”?

Looking for Logos requires looking at the main arguments of a piece and the information it presents to back it up: what should “make sense” is the rational connection between the premise and the conclusions. On another blog post, I used the example, if A and B, then C to explain Logos. Rewritten, it would be:

• Premise A:
• Premise B:
• Conclusion: 

And if your premises or conclusions can be challenged, then your logic fails, usually because you've made a logical fallacy. To explore this, I want to use the case of Spontaneous Generation, a now obsolete philosophy that held that organisms arose spontaneously from unrelated organisms, and not from similar organisms. The classic example is the theory maggots spawned from rotting meat. Let's break this down logically:

• Premise: After time, meat will rot.
• Premise: As meat rots, maggots will appear on it.
• Conclusion: Maggots are generated by the process of meat rotting.

To a modern reader, this will seem illogical, but this was the prevailing theory from ancient Greece until Francesco Redi tested it. In his experiment, Redi placed meat in jars, some of which were sealed with gauze. After some time, the exposed meat had maggots on it, but the sealed meat had none. From this experiment, Redi didn't disprove the first premise, but he did show the second premise is not as simple as it seems, causing him to doubt the conclusion and to theorize that something else must cause the maggots to appear.

For a biologist like Redi, “something else” isn't a good place to end, especially when challenging a premise that dates back to Aristotle. His theory then became the premise for the next phase of his experiment:

• Premise: Something must have access to and be attracted to the meat that generates the maggots.
• Premise: Flies can be observed around the rotting meat.
• Premise: Flies cannot access the meat in the sealed containers.
• Conclusion: Maggots appear after flies have access to rotting meat.

This then raises the question of what flies have to do with the meat and with the maggots. It could have been that maggots generated spontaneously from rotting meat when flies were nearby, or the flies bring the maggots, potentially disproving spontaneous generation. To test this, Redi placed some dead flies and maggots in one sealed jar with meat, and some living flies in another. After time, there were maggots on the meat in the jar with the flies, but none in the other:

• Premise: Maggots appear to generate after flies have access to rotting meat.
• Premise: The combination of dead flies and meat does not generate maggots.
• Premise: The combination of living flies and meat does generate maggots.
• Conclusion: It is not enough for flies and rotting meat, as base matter, to be in proximity to generate maggots.
• Conclusion: Maggots come from living flies.

Redi continued his experiments, catching some maggots and discovered they metamorphosed into flies, so maggots were just young flies left behind by flies eating the rotten meat, as opposed to generating from the raw meat or some other combination. This prompted Redi to conclude “omne vivum ex vivio” or, “all life comes from life.”

All of this is long example of how logic, Logos is a matter of presenting your conclusions alongside the process through which you came to them. Redi's example is one of scientific experimentation, but the same concept applies in any discourse: look for the evidence, combine it, and see what happens. The important thing to bear in mind is being logical requires critical thinking and analysis: such as not stopping with the first experiment, but modifying it as you look for an answer.