Topics, Questions, and Questions at Issue

Topics

A topic is simply a subject for discussion.  A topic can be a thing (e.g. water, handguns, pollution), an action (e.g. running, abortion, farming), a concept (e.g. freedom, censorship, health care), an emotion (e.g. love, hate, fear), a place (e.g. the college classroom, Nevada, a shopping mall), a person (e.g. George Bush, Vladimir Putin, Carlos Mencia)...well, the list could go on and on since a topic is anything we can discuss.  Think about something we can talk about and you have a topic.  Think about something we both want to talk about or need to talk about and you may have a good topic for discussion.

 

You've probably heard people talk about "controversial topics"—as in "Wow! Abortion is a very controversial topic."  But that phrase "controversial topic" is a bit inaccurate since topics are not, by themselves, controversial.  Controversy implies dispute or disagreement where two or more positions are in conflict with one another, and a topic cannot be disagreed with (or agreed with).  It simply is.  Abortion, handguns, and the death penalty, like water and running, are just things we can discuss.  If you say "abortion" to me, I cannot disagree with you or challenge you (I can't agree with you either).  In fact, the most logical response to you would be a question, a question like "What about it?" 

 

Questions

In general, questions are expressions that offer requests for information, and they are critical to a thinking person's ability to inquire (remember that inquiry is the process of discovering what, if anything, is worth believing about a topic and to what degree we are justified in believing this).  The question "What about it?" above seeks what is significant or important about the topic abortion.  We use questions everyday to bring us information that allows us to interpret the meaning of the world we live in.  Some examples of questions are

At the same time questions bring us information, they can also probe into new intellectual territory, expose complexity, reveal insight, and suggest other questions.  In the example above, when you say "abortion," I may respond with a question like, "What about it?"  You, then, may respond with something like "Teenagers should be prohibited from getting abortions without their parents' permission."  A statement such as this is certainly a controversial statement since many will disagree with it.  However, before I can decide to what degree that statement is worth believing and before I can offer a meaningful response, there are other questions I first have to ask.  For example, what is meant by "teenagers?"  And how will they be "prohibited?"  All abortions?  Which parents?  What if a teenager doesn't have parents?  And what constitutes "permission?"  How does the law treat this phenomenon now?  What are teen pregnancy and abortion rates?  What do experts like medical professionals, psychologists, and policy makers say about this issue?  And so on and so on.  As a serious inquirer who wants to know more so I can decide what is worth believing, I need to think carefully about what questions I should ask and of whom I should ask them.

 

But remember this: questions can be extraordinarily powerful.  Armed with the right questions, a news reporter can challenge power and expose corruption; a Zen student can discover the path to enlightenment; a college student can discover otherwise hidden connections and create new knowledge; and a thinking person can learn to live consciously and deliberately.  The more curious we are the more questions we ask.  Sometimes, however, people do not ask questions because they think they already possess all the answers worth having, and sometimes people avoid questions because they are afraid of the answers.  

 

Generally,

You have probably met people who ask few questions and people who ask questions in a hostile rather than inquisitive manner.  They often do these things because they do not want to know or do not believe they need to know more about the world we live in.  They may believe they have "the answers" already, and they may feel strongly that others simply need to learn what they already know.  The desire to believe this is understandable.  After all, the state of "knowing" creates pleasure; the state of "not-knowing" creates fear.  A question, by its nature, is an acknowledgment that we don't know, and it may take us into unknown, sometimes scary, territory.  Posing one question may simply generate many more questions and more uncertainty.  In fact, one of the paradoxes of questions is that at the same time they bring us information that allows us to "know" more, they also deepen our sense of how much we really don't know (it's like a flashlight: a bigger beam of light illuminates more around us at the same time is reveals more darkness).  It may, indeed, seem safer to avoid questions altogether and settle comfortably into our own knowledge cocoons, but keep in mind that this is a very superficial way to live.  Better to admit we know nothing and work from there than to pretend to know everything (Socrates went even further, proclaiming that the unexamined life [i.e. a life without inquiry and questions] is simply not worth living).  While we should perhaps feel sympathy for our unquestioning fellow humans, we should be wary of what they say, and we should resist the constant temptation to become like them.    

 

Finally, there are many different types of questions.  The type of question discussed above, the type that seeks information, is called the "interrogative."  Another type of question is the "rhetorical question"— a question with an obvious answer that is understood and not expected to be provided as a response (e.g. Is the Pope Catholic?).  Another, the "pre-suppositional" question, doesn't honestly seek information but instead makes any answer provided imply information the responder wouldn't otherwise affirm (e.g. Are you still beating your wife?).  But perhaps the most important kind of question for writers of analytical, argumentative essays is a "question at issue."

 

Questions at Issue

Simply put, a "question at issue" (QAI) is a question of agreed importance that intelligent, reasonable people can answer differently.  It is a question that "points" to a conflict or a controversy, and it serves as the launch point for an argument.  A question is not "at issue" if these conditions don't exist.

 

Let's unpackage that a bit.  Let's say we're both reasonable, intelligent people—that is, people who are motivated by the desire to know what is true and wise and not simply by our emotions or the desire to confirm what we already think we know—and we are the discussing a class (let's say English 1A) that's about to begin.  It's the first day of the semester, and we're both waiting for the instructor to show up and begin.  There are many, many questions we can ask about the topic of our English 1A class that will, hopefully, bring us more information about it:

We may seek answers to these questions from our class schedules, from classmates who are also sitting there waiting, at some point from the instructor, etc. and as long as we agree to the accuracy of the answers we get to these questions, none of these questions are "at issue."  We are both standing firmly on what we'll called "shared ground"—that is, information that we both agree to accept—and we can continue exploring this topic of English 1A with questions.  As soon as we come to question that generates different responses or that generates a response we don't both agree to accept, we've got a problem:

If you say "yes" and I say "no" in response to this question, we've got a problem because we've got a question we haven't resolved—that is, we have a question that we haven't answered in a way we'll both agree to.  We have a conflict, a disagreement, or a controversy now, and the question "points" at that conflict without indicating a specific position.  We, therefore, have a question at issue (incidentally, we would have arrived a question at issue earlier if we had not generated a response to any of the previous questions that we both agreed to).  If the question didn't matter to one or both us (i.e. if one of us said, "I don't care about that.  I'm more interested in math requirements"), it wouldn't be "at issue."  If one of us were unreasonable or didn't have any idea what we were talking about, the question wouldn't be "at issue" (why would we want to argue with people who are irrational or uninformed?).  And, finally, if we agreed to an answer to the question, it wouldn't be "at issue." 

 

As stated above, then, topics aren't controversial, but there are questions about topics that point to controversies involving topics.  On the topic of abortion there are many questions, and if we agree to answers, they are not questions at issue.  If we disagree, it becomes a question at issue. 

All of these could be questions at issue.  Then again, if we agree to answers, the questions are not "at issue." 

 

QUALITIES OF GOOD QUESTIONS AT ISSUE

 

A good question at issue is a debatable question that matters to your audience.  If you pose a question to an audience of intelligent, reasonable people (think of your classmates or readers of Time magazine), will it generate oppositional responses or will the majority of people respond in similar ways?  If most people already agree to an answer to the question, then it's likely not a question at issue.  The question

used to be a QAI and was vigorously debated.  Now, however, there is widespread agreement on an answer, and the question is no longer "at issue."  There is an exception to this principle of debatability: if your answer to the question challenges widely-accepted responses to the question and if you have logical reasons and evidence to support your response, you have an issue you can argue.

 

A good question at issue uses language that all sides will agree to: Remember that a QAI "points" at a conflict.  All sides need to agree that the question posed fairly captures the problem and fairly points at the controversy.  Language that "loads" the question (i.e. slants the questions to one side) or indicates judgment is not acceptable.  Thus, a question like

is likely to be rejected as an unfair question by many members of the debate.  Similarly, so is a question like

How might you revise the above questions so that all sides of the debate will agree that the questions fairly point at the conflicts?

 

A good question at issue is clearly and logically worded: If a QAI is not clearly worded and, therefore, not understandable, then how are participants in the discussion going to know what's being debated?  Moreover, how is a writer to know how to respond to a QAI if he/she cannot understand what the QAI is asking?

 

A good question at issue is specific: Consider QAI's like the following:

The QAI's are clearly worded, and they are expressed in acceptable, non-inflammatory language.  They are, though, so general that they will be hard to debate.  One side can say, "Yes, the government should do something" and "Yes, school cafeterias should change their menus to offer more health conscious items," and the other can say "No."  But what are they really saying "yes" and "no" to?  What, specifically, should government do?  And which part of government?  And which schools should change their cafeteria menus?  Public schools?  Grade schools?  High schools?  Colleges?  And how should they change their menus?  And what "health conscious items" are we concerned with here?  Consider these revisions:

Again, since the QAI serves as the launch point for discussion, the more specific you can be about what exactly you want to discuss the better. 

 

a good question at issue is focused on the issue the writer wants to address: Often, I see writers struggling to work with QAI's that don't point clearly to the conflict they really want to engage.  I worked with a student once, for example, who described for me all the interesting thinking and reading she'd been doing about the legal battles over gay marriage in various US states.  She knew various laws that had been passed and repealed, the arguments for and against these actions, what the US constitution says, and where the issue seemed to be heading in the near future.  Despite all of her knowledge of the issue, she was struggling to generate a good response to her QAI:

It's a good QAI—interesting, timely, relevant, specific, clear, debatable.  The problem was that the QAI was not focused on the same conflict that the writer was focused on.  The writer began by exploring gay marriage and definitions of family but quickly turned toward legal issues surrounding gay marriage.  These two ideas are certainly related and are both clearly issues involving the topic of gay marriage.  But the QAI was not allowing her to keep focused on the issue her mind was occupied with.  Her problem was solved once she revised her QAI to focus clearly on the issue she was concerned with:

A good question at issue is manageable: The scope of the QAI will dictate the scope of the essay that offers a response to the QAI.  A QAI like

is focused, specific, clearly worded, debatable...it looks good.  But can you handle it intelligently in a 6-8 page essay?  Readers expect you to offer a thoughtful, detailed response to the QAI.  Can you do that in such a limited space, or will you find yourself having to "cut short" certain aspects of the issue in order to "fit it all in?"  Remember that it is, generally speaking, better to tell readers a lot about a little than it is to tell them a little about a lot.  Bite off only what you can chew.  Focus sharply and limit what you'll cover in order to cover what you do in lots of good, specific detail.  A QAI like

may be much more workable since we can focus on just one method of execution.  We can give full treatment to this one aspect of the topic and address the other methods in other essays if we choose to.

 

Now What?

Once you have a manageable, focused, specific, clearly-worded, debatable QAI that matters to you and your audience, you should generate a list of other questions you need to find answers to in order to provide a reasonable, intelligent response to the QAI.  For the last example QAI above, we may need to find answers to some of the following questions in order to offer a response to the QAI:

As you generate questions and discover answers, you may find the need to sharpen, reword, or even abandon your QAI.