6: Ambition and Restraint

Step 2: Gather Information

Once you’ve decided on a particular question that you have a genuine interest in, your next step is to begin gathering information and developing an informed opinion on the subject.

Start with What You Know

While you will certainly want to consult a wide variety of sources, including research studies, statistics, and articles by experts, it’s often a good idea to start with what you know. Draw on your experiences, as well as those of others around you, to begin informing your view on the subject.

Look at this excerpt from the speech that Malala Yousafzai delivered at the United Nations and notice how she incorporates an anecdote about a classmate’s experience into her argument:

I remember that there was a boy in our school who was asked by a journalist, “Why are the Taliban against education?” He answered very simply. By pointing to his book he said, “A Talib doesn’t know what is written inside this book.” They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits.

When you have a genuine interest in the argument you plan to write, there is likely some kind of personal experience that you (or people you know) have had with your topic. If, for instance, your question is “Why do some school districts receive more funding than others?” you can think about the facilities and class sizes at your own school, and you can ask your family members or friends about the schools they attended.

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ACTIVITY

Choose one of the questions that you wrote for the Activity above and write three to five examples from your own experiences, or those of people you know, that could give you information about your question. While eventually, this might be used as evidence, at this point, you are still at the information-gathering stage. Feel free to ask friends, classmates, and relatives, or to even conduct surveys (either online or offline) to learn more about their feelings or experiences with the question you selected. If you cannot identify personal examples that might illustrate elements of your question, consider choosing a different topic because this one might not be authentic or relevant to your interests.

Investigate the Issue

Personal experience is a good place to start an argument. It gets you invested in the issue. Nevertheless, personal experience is not enough to give you the complete picture. You need to encounter multiple perspectives on the issue, look into the details of the situation, and investigate every angle possible. You need to go from having an opinion to having an informed opinion.

Begin by seeking answers to your questions. Who might have expertise on the issue you’ve chosen to write about? Scientists? Psychologists? Politicians?

In his piece “Ambition: Why Some People Are Most Likely to Succeed,” Jeffrey Kluger asks this question:

Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others [. . .] need something to get their pilot light lit? And why do others never get the flame of ambition going?

To answer this question, Kluger consults the Shipp brothers—two very successful businessmen who were unmotivated until their late twenties, when they started their first business—for information about their personal experience, but then he moves on to consider a variety of disciplines to inform his opinion on the question:

Biology: “Even before wolf pups are weaned, they begin sorting themselves out into alphas and all the others.”
Business: “Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer and then left the company. [. . .]”
Anthropology: “‘Ambition is an evolutionary product,’ says anthropologist Edward Lowe. [. . .]”
Psychology: “Dean Simonton, a psychologist [. . .], believes it’s more complicated than that. ‘Ambition is energy and determination,’ he says.”
History: “We may listen to Mozart, but should we applaud Salieri?”
Genetics: “Ongoing studies of identical twins have measured achievement motivation. [. . .]”
Economics: “Economists [. . .] gave them five minutes to add up as many two-digit numbers as they could, and paid them 50¢ for each correct answer.”

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Although you do not necessarily need to consult sources from this many disciplines, we hope that Kluger’s examples give you some sense of what it means to develop an informed opinion. So, as you develop your topic and the questions that will guide your investigation, ask yourself which different fields of study might hold some answers.

It’s likely that your investigation will uncover just as many new questions as it does answers. Learn to embrace that complexity. Understanding that every issue is complicated and that issues almost never have a clear answer will prevent you from writing an argument that is closed-minded, unreasonable, and not persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

ACTIVITY

Returning to your question, begin conducting research in order to identify the following:

Who are three to five experts in the fields that your question relates to? These will be the names of people who are referenced in many articles or in the bibliographies of multiple Wikipedia pages.
What are the most controversial parts to your question? Why is there controversy?
What are two or three of the most interesting or surprising facts or results of research studies that relate to your question?

If you cannot find a wide range of information or controversy about your question, consider choosing a different topic. It is far better to switch topics at this point than to continue forward with one that might not work well.