From Identifying Issues to

Forming Questions
Chapter 4
 Inquiries
Inquiry is central to the process of composing.
Writing grows out of answering these questions:
• What are the concerns of the authors?
• What situations motivate them to write?
• What frames or contexts do they use to construct
their arguments?
 Inquiries
Writing grows out of answering these questions:
• What is my argument in response to their writing?
• What is at stake in my argument?
• Who will be interested in reading what I have to
say?
• How can I connect with readers?
• What kinds of evidence will persuade my readers?
• What objections are they likely to raise?
• To answer these questions, you must read in
the role of writer, with an eye toward

– identifying an issue (an idea or a statement that is

open to dispute) that compels you to respond in
writing

– understanding the situation (the factors that give

rise to the issue and shape your response)

– formulating a question (what you intend to answer

in response to the issue)
• Table 4.1 shows a series of situations and
one of the issues and questions that
derive from each of them.

• The question you ask

– defines the area of inquiry as you read;
– can help formulate your working thesis = the
statement that answers your question.
 Situation Issue Question
TABLE
Different state4.1 A Series
legislatures are ofMost
Situations
research onwith RelatedUnder
learning Issueswhatand Questions
conditions should
passing legislation to prevent contradicts the idea that students be allowed to use
Spanish-speaking students students should be prevented their own language while they
from using their own language from using their own language learn English?
in schools. in the process of learning a new
language.

A manufacturing company has You feel that this company What would persuade the city
plans to move to your city with will compromise the quality of to prevent this company from
the promise of creating new life for the surrounding moving in, even though the
jobs in a period of high community because the company will provide much-
unemployment. manufacturing process will needed jobs?
pollute the air.

Your school has made an You see that the school has Is there another way for the
agreement with a local much to gain from this school to generate needed
company to supply vending arrangement, but you also revenue without putting
machines that sell drinks and know that obesity is a growing students’ health at risk?
food. The school plans to use problem at the school.
its share of the profit to
improve the library and
purchase a new scoreboard for
the football field.
 Identifying Issues
• Steps to identifying an issue
– You don’t have to follow these steps in this particular order.
– Issues do not simply exist in the world well formed.
– Writers construct what they see as issues from the
situations they observe.
– E.g., consider legislation to limit downloads from the
Internet.
• If such legislation conflicts with your own practices and sense of
freedom, you may have begun to identify an issue: the clash of
values over what constitutes fair use and what does not.
• Be aware that others may not understand your issue and that in
your writing you will have to explain carefully what is at stake.
 Steps to identifying an issue
• Draw on Your Personal Experience
• Identify What Is Open to Dispute
• Resist Binary thinking
• Build on and Extend the Ideas of Others
• Read to Discover a Writer’s Frame
• Consider the Constraints of the Situation
 Draw on Your Personal Experience
• Personal experiences influence how we read, what we pay
attention to, what inferences we draw
-> begin with you .

• Use personal experience to argue a point, to illustrate

something, to illuminate a connection between theories and
the sense we make of our daily experience.

-> use your story to strengthen your argument.

– E.g, in Cultural Literacy, E. D. Hirsch personalizes his interest in
reversing the cycle of illiteracy in America’s cities. (Chapter 2 p 32)
 Identify What Is Open to Dispute
• An issue is something open to dispute.
• To clarify an issue: think of it as a fundamental tension between two or
more conflicting points of view -> identify conflicting points of view
– E. D. Hirsch: the best approach to educational reform is to change the
curriculum in schools.
His position: A curriculum based on cultural literacy is the one sure way to
reverse the cycle of poverty and illiteracy in urban areas.
– What is the issue? Hirsch’s issue emerges in the presence of an alternative
position. Jonathan Kozol, a social activist, believes that policymakers need to
address reform by providing the necessary resources that all students need
to learn. Kozol points out that students in many inner-city schools are reading
outdated textbooks and that the dilapidated conditions in these schools—
windows that won’t close —make it impossible for students to learn.
– In tension are two different views of the reform that can reverse illiteracy:
. Hirsch’s view: educational reform should occur through curricular changes,
. Kozol’s view: educational reform demands socioeconomic resources.
 Resist Binary thinking
• Try to resist the either/or mind-set that signals binary thinking.
– Do not characterize the problems facing schools as either curricular or
socioeconomic.
– The real issue maybe combines these arguments with a third or even a
fourth, that neither curricular nor socio-economic changes by
themselves can resolve the problems with American schools.
– One student pointed out that both Hirsch’s focus on curriculum and
Kozol’s socio-economic focus ignore another concern. She described
her school experience in racial terms. She uses personal experience
(in a new school, she is not treated as she had expected to be treated)
to formulate an issue in the excerpt in textbook p76.
Moving from Colorado Springs to Tallahassee, I was immediately struck by the
differences apparent in local home life, school life, and community unity, or
lack thereof. Ripped from my sheltered world at a small Catholic school
characterized by racial harmony, I was thrown into a large public school where
outward prejudice from classmates and teachers and “race wars” were
common and tolerated. . . .

In a school where students and teachers had free rein to abuse anyone
different from them, I was constantly abused. As the only black student in
English honors, I was commonly belittled in front of my “peers” by my teacher.
If I developed courage enough to ask a question, I was always answered with
the use of improper grammar and such words as “ain’t” as my teacher
attempted to simplify the material to “my level” and to give me what he called
“a little learning.” After discussing several subjects, he often turned to me,
singling me out of a sea of white faces, and asked, “Do you understand, Mila?”
When asking my opinion of a subject, he frequently questioned, “What do your
people think about this?” Although he insisted on including such readings as
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in the curriculum, the speech’s
themes of tolerance and equity did not accompany his lesson.
• This student discovered that few prominent scholars have
confronted the issue of racism in schools directly.
• Although she grants that curricular reform and increased funding
may be necessary to improve education, she argues that scholars
also need to address race in their studies of teaching and learning.

-> issues may be more complex than you first think they are.
For this student, the issue wasn’t one of two positions
—reform the curriculum or provide more funding.
Instead, it combined a number of different positions, including race
(“prejudice” and “race wars”) and the relationship between student
and teacher (“Do you understand, Mila?”) in a classroom.

• In this passage, the writer uses her experience to challenge binary

thinking.
-> You should examine issues from different perspectives,
avoiding either/or propositions that oversimplify the world.
 Build on and Extend the Ideas of Others

• By extending other people’s ideas, you will extend your own.

• As you read more and pursue connections to other readings,

you may end up at an unexpected destination.

• For example, one student was troubled when he read Melissa

Stormont-Spurgin’s description of homeless children. The
student uses details from her work (giving credit, of course) in
his own:
The children . . . went to school after less than three hours of
sleep. They wore the same wrinkled clothes that they had
worn the day before. What will their teachers think when they
fall asleep in class? How will they get food for lunch? What
will their peers think? What could these homeless children
talk about with their peers? They have had to grow up too
fast. Their worries are not the same as other children’s
worries. They are worried about their next meal and where
they will seek shelter. Their needs, however, are the same.
They need a home and all of the securities that come with it.
They also need an education (Stormont-Spurgin 156).
• Initially the student was troubled by his own access to
quality schools, and the contrast between his life and
the lives of the children Stormont-Spurgin describes.

• His issue: the fundamental tension between his own

privileged status, something he had taken for
granted, and the struggle that homeless children
face every day.

• However, as he read further and grew to understand

homelessness as a concern in a number of studies, he
connected his personal response to a larger
conversation about democracy, fairness, and
education:
Melissa Stormont-Spurgin, an author of several articles on
educational studies, addresses a very real and important, yet
avoided issue in education today. Statistics show that a very high
percentage of children who are born into homeless families will
remain homeless, or in poverty, for the rest of their lives. How
can this be, if everyone actually does have the same educational
opportunities? There must be significant educational
disadvantages for children without homes. In a democratic
society, I feel that we must pay close attention to these
disadvantages and do everything in our power to replace them
with equality.
• Ultimately, the student refined his sense of what was at issue:
Although all people should have access to public
education in a democratic society, not everyone has the
opportunity to attend quality schools in order to achieve
personal success.
• In turn, his definition of the issue began to shape his argument:
– Parents, teachers, homeless shelters, and the citizens of
the United States who fund [homeless] shelters must
address the educational needs of homeless children, while
steering them away from any more financial or
psychological struggles. Without this emphasis on
education, the current trend upward in the number of
homeless families will inevitably continue in the future of
American society.
• The student shifted away from a personal issue
— the difference between his status and that of homeless children —

to an issue of clashing values:

— the principle of egalitarian democracy on the one hand & the reality of citizens
in a democracy living in abject poverty on the other.

• When he started to read about homeless children, he could not have

made the claim he ends up making, that policymakers must make
education a basic human right.

• This student offers us an important lesson about the role of inquiry and
the value of resisting easy answers.

He has built on and extended his own ideas—and the ideas of others—
after repeating the process of reading, raising questions, writing, and
seeing problems a number of times.
 Read to Discover a Writer’s Frame
• Writer’s frame = the perspective through which a writer presents his or

her arguments.

– Writers want us to see the world a certain way, so they frame their arguments

much the same way photographers and artists frame their pictures.

• E.g. taking a picture of friends in front of the football stadium on campus,

you would focus on what you would most like to remember — friends’
faces — blurring the images of the people walking behind your friends.

Setting up the picture, or framing it, might require using light and shade

to make some details stand out more than others.

Writers do the same with language.

• E. D. Hirsch uses the concept of cultural literacy to frame his
argument for curricular reform.

• For Hirsch, the term is a standard:

People who are culturally literate are familiar with the body of information
that every educated citizen should know.

• Hirsch’s implication, of course, is that people who are not culturally

literate are not well educated. (-> not necessarily true.) In fact, a
number of educators insist that literacy is simply a means to an end
— reading to complete an assignment, for example, or to
understand the ramifications of a decision — not an end in itself.

• By defining and using cultural literacy as the goal of education,

Hirsch is framing his argument; he is bringing his ideas into focus.
Framing often entails quoting specific theories and ideas from other
authors and then using those quotations as a perspective, or lens,
through which to examine other material.

In Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982),

Richard Rodriguez uses this method (framing) to examine his situation
as a nonnative speaker of English desperate to enter the mainstream
culture, even if it means sacrificing his identity as the son of Mexican
immigrants. Reflecting on his life as a student, Rodriguez comes
across Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart’s
description of “the scholarship boy” presents a lens through which
Rodriguez can see his own experience. Hoggart writes:
With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s
consolation in feeling public alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life.
Then, at school, the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily.
Immediate needs set the pace of his parents’ lives. From his mother and
father the boy learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing.
Then, at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of a
reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action.

Years of schooling must pass before the boy will be able to sketch the
cultural differences in his day as abstractly as this. But he senses those
differences early. Perhaps as early as the night he brings home an
assignment from school and finds the house too noisy for study. He has to
be more and more alone, if he is going to “get on.” He will have, probably
unconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense
gregariousness of the working-class family group. . . . The boy has to cut
himself off mentally, so as to do his homework, as well as he can.
• Here is Rodriguez’s response to Hoggart’s description of
the scholarship boy:

– For weeks I read, speed-read, books by modern educational

theorists, only to find infrequent and slight mention of
students like me. . . . Then one day, leafing through Richard
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of
the scholarship boy, myself. For the first time I realized that
there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame
the meaning of my academic success, its consequent price
— the loss.
• Notice how Rodriguez introduces ideas from Hoggart “to frame” his own
ideas: “I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself. For the first
time I realized that there were other students like me, and so I was able to
frame the meaning of my academic success, its consequent price—the loss.”
• Hoggart’s scholarship boy enables Rodriguez to revisit his own experience
with a new perspective. Hoggart’s words and idea advance Rodriguez’s
understanding of the problem he identifies in his life: his inability to find
solace at home and within his working-class roots. Hoggart’s description of
the scholarship boy’s moving between cultural extremes—spontaneity at
home and reflection at school—helps Rodriguez bring his own youthful
discontent into focus.
• Rodriguez’s response to Hoggart’s text shows how another writer’s lens can
help frame an issue. If you were using Hoggart’s term scholarship boy as a
lens through which to clarify an issue in education, you might ask how the
term illuminates new aspects of another writer’s examples or your own. And
then you might ask, “To what extent does Hirsch’s cultural literacy throw a
more positive light on what Rodriguez and Hoggart describe?” or “How do my
experiences challenge, extend, or complicate the scholarshipboy concept?”
 Consider the Constraints of the Situation
• In identifying an issue -> understand the situation that
gives rise to the issue, including
– The contexts in which it is raised and debated.
– The audience: Consider the extent to which your potential readers
are involved in the dialogue you want to enter, and what they know
and need to know. Audience functions as both context and
constraint, a factor that narrows the choices you can make in
responding to an issue.
– An understanding of your potential readers will help you choose
– the depth of your discussion;
– the kind of evidence
– the language you can use.
 Consider the Constraints of the Situation
• Another constraint on your response to an issue is the form that response
takes. E.g., making an issue of government-imposed limits on what you can
download from the Internet, your response in writing might take the form of
an editorial or a letter to a legislator. In this situation, length is an obvious
constraint: Newspapers limit the word count of editorials, and the best letters
to legislators tend to be brief and very selective about the evidence they cite.
A few personal examples and a few statistics may be all you can include to
support your claim about the issue. By contrast, if you were making your
case in an academic journal, a very different set of constraints would apply.
E.g., more space for illustrations and support.

• Finally, the situation itself can function as a major constraint. E.g., suppose
your topic is the decline of educational standards. It’s difficult to imagine any
writer making the case for accelerating that decline, or any audience being
receptive to the idea that a decline in standards is a good thing.
 Steps to Identifying Issues
• Draw on your personal experience. Start with your own sense of what’s
important, what puzzles you, or what you are curious about. (Then build
your argument by moving on to other sources to support your point of view.)
• Identify what is open to dispute. Identify a phenomenon or some idea in a
written argument that challenges what you think or believe.
• Resist binary thinking. Think about the issue from multiple perspectives.
• Build on and extend the ideas of others. As you read, be open to new ways
of looking at the issue. The issue you finally write about may be very
different from what you set out to write about.
• Read to discover a writer’s frame. What theories or ideas shape the writer’s
focus? How can these theories or ideas help you frame your argument?
• Consider the constraints of the situation. Craft your argument to meet the
needs of and constraints imposed by your audience and form.
 Identify Issues in an essay
• In the following editorial, published in 2002 in Newsweek, writer Anna
Quindlen addresses her concern that middle-class parents overschedule
their children’s lives. She calls attention to the ways leisure time helped
her develop as a writer and urges parents to consider the extent to which
children’s creativity depends on having some downtime. They don’t
always have to have their time scheduled. As you read Quindlen’s “Doing
Nothing Is Something,” note what words and phrases Quindlen uses to
identify the situation and to indicate who her audience is. Identify her
main claim as one of fact, value, or policy. Finally, answer the questions
that follow the selection to see if you can discern how she locates,
defines, and advances her issue.
• See textbook
 Reading as a Writer
1. What evidence of Quindlen’s personal responses and
experiences can you identify?
2. What phenomenon has prompted her to reflect on what she
thinks and believes? How has she made it into an issue?
3. Where does she indicate that she has considered the issue
from multiple perspectives and is placing her ideas in
conversation with those of others?
4. What sort of lens does she seem to be using to frame her
argument?
5. What constraints (such as the format of an editorial) seem
to be in play in the essay?
 A Practice Sequence: Identifying Issues
• Draw on your personal experience.
– Reflect on your own responses to what you have been reading in this class or in other
classes, or issues that writers have posed in the media. What concerns you most? Choose a
story that supports or challenges the claims people are making in what you have read or
listened to. What questions do you have? Make some notes in response to these questions,
explaining your personal stake in the issues and questions you formulate.

• Identify what is open to dispute.

– Take what you have written and formulate your ideas as an issue, using the structure we
used in our example of Hirsch’s and Kozol’s competing arguments:
• Part 1: Your view of a given topic
• Part 2: At least one view that is in tension with your own
– Read further to understand what others have to say about this issue.
• Resist binary thinking.
– Share your statement of the issue with one or more peers and ask them if they see other
ways to formulate the issue that you may not have thought about. What objections, if any, do
they make to your statement in part 1? Write these objections down in part 2 so that you
begin to look at the issue from multiple perspectives.
 A Practice Sequence: Identifying Issues
• Build on and extend the ideas of others.
– Having formulated an issue from different perspectives, explained your personal stake in the
issue, now you connect what you think to a broader conversation in what you are reading. Try
making a claim using this structure: “Although some people would argue __, I think that __.”

• Read to discover a writer’s frame.

– Revise the claim you make in exercise 4 by introducing the frame, or lens, through which you
want readers to understand your argument. You can employ the same sentence structure.
• E.g., here is a claim framed in terms of race: “Although people should have access to public education, recent policies
have worsened racial inequalities in public schools.”
• In contrast, here is a claim that focuses on economics: “Although people should have access to public education, the
unequal distribution of tax money has created what some would call an ‘economy of education.’”
• The lens may come from reading you have done in other courses or from conversations with your classmates, and
you may want to attribute the lens to a particular author or classmate: “Although some people would argue_____, I
use E. D. Hirsch’s notion of cultural literacy to show_____.”

• Consider the constraints of the situation.

– Building on these exercises, develop an argument in the form of an editorial for your local
newspaper -> you will need to limit your argument to abt 250 words. You also will need to
consider the extent to which your potential readers are involved in the conversation. What do
they know? What do they need to know? What kind of evidence do you need to use to
persuade readers?