The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing

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 …

A screenshot of the “only the questions” app

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” …

A box of text with the results from analyzing Thoreau, beginning: “Was that a farmer’s noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? Why will men worry themselves so? Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose? Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you?”

A box of text with the results from analyzing Thoreau, beginning: “Was that a farmer’s noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now? Why will men worry themselves so? Who would live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose? Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you?”

I put in all of George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”, and got this …

A screenshot of the result of processing the text, beginning with this: “Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?) A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer?”

A screenshot of the result of processing the text, beginning with this: “Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?) A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer?”

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 …

A screenshot of the processed text, beginning: “Soul, wilt thou toss again? How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, “But the forty? Did they come back no more?” Brazil? He twirled a button, Without a glance my way: “But, madam, is there nothing else That we can show to-day?” Can I expound the skies? Was it the mat winked, Or a nervous star? There’s plunder, — where? Screams chanticleer, “Who’s there?” And echoes, trains away, Sneer — “Where?””

A screenshot of the processed text, beginning: “Soul, wilt thou toss again? How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, “But the forty? Did they come back no more?” Brazil? He twirled a button, Without a glance my way: “But, madam, is there nothing else That we can show to-day?” Can I expound the skies? Was it the mat winked, Or a nervous star? There’s plunder, — where? Screams chanticleer, “Who’s there?” And echoes, trains away, Sneer — “Where?””

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 …

A screenshot of the result, reading: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied?”

A screenshot of the result, reading: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied?”

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 …

A screenshot of the result: “You ask, what is our policy? You ask, what is our aim?”

A screenshot of the result: “You ask, what is our policy? You ask, what is our aim?”

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 …

A screenshot of the results, beginning: “At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?) Here is what it is: The girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m.”

A screenshot of the results, beginning: “At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?) Here is what it is: The girl has been on the Eastern Shore, and now she is going back to the city, leaving the man beside her, and all she can see ahead are the viscous summer sidewalks and the 3 a.m.”

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 …

A screenshot of the results, beginning: “”Did it frighten you how we kissed on the lighted up floor?”

A screenshot of the results, beginning: “”Did it frighten you how we kissed on the lighted up floor?”

There were rather fewer questions in, say, the entire Nevermind album by Nirvana …

A screenshot of the results, reading: “Hello, hello, hello, how low? Hello, hello, hello, how low? Hello, hello, hello, how low? I don’t care, I don? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? What the hell am I trying to say? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do?”

A screenshot of the results, reading: “Hello, hello, hello, how low? Hello, hello, hello, how low? Hello, hello, hello, how low? I don’t care, I don? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? What the hell am I trying to say? I know it’s wrong so what should I do? I know it’s wrong so what should I do?”

(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” …

A screenshot of the processed results, beginning: “Wouldn’t you like to have a magic phrase that would stop arguments, eliminate ill feeling, create good will, and make the other person listen attentively? Yes? SHE: (in incisive, cultured, well-bred tones): To whom have I the honor of speaking? Would I not restore her to health by withdrawing the first name and replacing it by her son’s? Just think about it, Okay?’ “ Did Mrs. Norris threaten Babette? Did she say she would refuse to teach”

A screenshot of the processed results, beginning: “Wouldn’t you like to have a magic phrase that would stop arguments, eliminate ill feeling, create good will, and make the other person listen attentively? Yes? SHE: (in incisive, cultured, well-bred tones): To whom have I the honor of speaking? Would I not restore her to health by withdrawing the first name and replacing it by her son’s? Just think about it, Okay?’ “ Did Mrs. Norris threaten Babette? Did she say she would refuse to teach”

… which nicely captures his rather kooky style.

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