All the sentences in the first chapter of Moby Dick that pose a question
(tl;dr — if you want to try out my web tool for seeing only the questions in a piece of writing, it’s online here!)
When we’re writing, why do we ask questions?
Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary signpost, a little trick for ushering the reader along: Great question, glad you asked, let me answer that one!
Other times the questions are truly … questions. They come from the moments where we’re genuinely humble, and have arrived at the limits of our knowledge. We’re just thinking out loud, and, ideally, trying to find a really good question, one that frames our ignorance in a productive fashion. Many thinkers — from Socrates to my personal fave literary scholar Northrop Frye — argued that the acme of intellectual life wasn’t in knowing stuff but devising the truly puzzling, awe-inspiring questions that echo in the mind for years.
Of course, sometimes questions are sort of fun — jokey ones, where everyone knows the answer (or thinks they do), so the writer is just making a bond with the audience.
And surely there are even more — far more — ways to use questions, right? (See what I did there? (And there?))
I’ve been watching how writers use questions lately, and thought: Hmmm, it’d be cool to see only the questions in a piece of prose.
I probably started down this line of thinking because last fall I created a little web tool that removes everything but the punctuation from a piece of writing. That tool wound up being a pretty intriguing type of literary x-ray: I discovered, for example, that I use a ton of parentheticals (and way too many m-dashes).
Since I already had the code for that, it wasn’t too hard for me to program a version focuses on questions instead.
So here it is — “Only The Questions”, hosted on Glitch …
I started plugging in all sorts of writing — novels, essays, op-eds, chapters of books — to see what things looked like. I quickly discovered two things …
- interestingly, fiction often doesn’t produce interesting results. That’s because dialogue often includes questions, and you get too many of them in a row, so now you’re just reading dialogue. In contrast …
- … essays, memoirs, speeches and personal writing often work really well. In those forms, the writer is speaking directly to the audience, and the questions have a really personal appeal: They’re directed straight at you, the reader, so they have a particularly electrical charge. When you see them all lined up, you get an intriguing glimpse into the author’s intellectual focus.
You can spy fun literary patterns in major writers. I processed a few chapters from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and saw that he loves questions that range from gnarlily specific (what’s that noise in my field?) to soaringly philosophical.
This is his chapter “Brute Neighbors” …
I put in all of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”, and got this …
Again, you can feel Orwell’s style here: Questions that are much more blunt and to-the-point.
I put in a couple dozen Emily Dickinson poems, and the result is just delightfully surreal …
One of the things that’s really interesting is when you find writers that use almost no questions.
That’s the case with Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech, which is over 1,600 words long but contains only one single question …
King’s speech proclaims and testifies and bears witness; he only uses that one question as a quick rhetorical pivot, to deftly characterize some of the many Americans standing in the way of justice.
Winston Churchill does a similar thing with his famous “blood, sweat and tears” speech, except in this case the question reaches out to (what he hopes is) a sympathetic audience: He speaks twice, directly, to the British public, showing he understands the big questions on their mind as he asks them to sacrifice heavily for the fight …
Some essayists are quite witty in how they deploy questions. This is Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping A Notebook”, and the electic rustle of questions is a nice map of her fantastic style …
Putting lyrics into this tool can be pretty wild. Songs have questions! I took all the lyrics for Lorde’s album Melodrama and here you go …
There were rather fewer questions in, say, the entire Nevermind album by Nirvana …
(Granted, I’m scraping these lyrics from online databases, so who knows if they’ve got the punctuation right in the first place, lol.)
And here’s one last one — the ninth chapter of Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, entitled “What Everybody Wants” …
… which nicely captures his rather kooky style.
Anyway, give it a try! If you create an interesting or funny image of questions, take a screenshot and tweet it — tag me so I can see.
Oh, and a privacy note: Whatever text you type into the tool isn’t saved or stored anywhere. You can check out the code on Glitch if you want to be sure, and remix it and reuse it yourself if you want.
BTW, for a bit of meta, here are all the questions I used in this very piece …
Clive Thompson publishes on Medium three times a week; follow him here to get each post in your email — and if you’re not a Medium member, you can join here.
Clive is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.