Asking a question before supplying an answer

Read and Listen

For Teachers

It’s helpful to model ways to change topics into appropriate inquiry-based questions. Spend some time working with the whole class to transform a few topics into questions before asking students to do this independently.

Many writers learn to start a research project by first choosing a topic—how fashion magazines create body image problems for women or the importance of eating locally-produced food, for example. Often the next steps are settling on a thesis and searching for information that would help address or support that thesis.

We want to challenge you to flip this approach so that you start the research process by asking questions and settle on a thesis or main point only after you have gathered some answers to your questions. It may sound strange to think of the first phase of a researched writing project as asking questions rather than settling on a research topic, but going through the process of answering those questions helps you arrive at an argument that is personally meaningful to you and more likely to reach its target audience.