Asking the right questions pdf download

For exam- ple, answers to the first two questions might be, "In general, families with pets have fewer arguments with one another," and "Poor dietary habits cause high blood pressure. They are commonly found in textbooks, magazines, the Internet, and television. Such issues reflect our curiosity about patterns or order in the world. Note the boldfaced words that begin each ques- tion above; when questions begin with these words, they will probably be descriptive questions.

Attention: Descriptive issues are those that raise questions about the accuracy of descriptions of the past, present, or future. What Are the Issue and the Conclusion? What ought to be done about social security? Must we outlaw SUVs or face increasing rates of asthma? All of these questions demand answers suggesting the way the world ought to be. For example, answers to the first two questions might be, "Capital punish- ment should be abolished," and "We ought to increase social security benefits.

They demand pre- scriptive answers. Thus, we will refer to these issues as prescriptive issues. Social controversies are often prescriptive issues. We have somewhat oversimplified. Sometimes it will be difficult to decide what kind of issue is being discussed. It will be useful to keep these distinctions in mind, however, because the kinds of critical evaluations you eventually make will differ depending on the kind of issue to which you are responding.

Attention: Prescriptive issues are those that raise questions about what we should do or what is right or wrong, good or bad.

Searching for the Issue How does one go about determining the basic question or issue? Sometimes it is very simple: The writer or speaker will tell you what it is. Alternatively, the issue may be identified in the body of the text, usually right at the beginning, or it may even be found in the title. When the issue is explicitly stated, it will be indicated by phrases such as the following: The question I am raising is: Why must we have speed limits on our highways?

Lowering the legal drinking age: Is it the right thing to do? Should sex education be taught in the schools? Unfortunately, the question is not always explicitly stated and instead must be inferred from other clues in the communication. For example, many writers or speakers are reacting to some current event that concerns them, such as a series of violent acts in schools.

Asking "What is the author reacting to? So check for background information about the author as you try to determine the issue. When you are identifying the issue, try to resist the idea that there is one and only one correct way to state the issue. Once you have found a question that the entire essay or speech is addressing, and you can show the link between that question and the essay or speech, you have found the issue. Just make cer- tain that what you are calling an issue meets the definitional criteria for that idea.

The surest way to detect an issue when it is not explicitly stated, however, is to locate the conclusion. In many cases, the conclusion must be found be- fore you can identify the issue. Thus, in such cases, the first step in critical eval- uation is to find the conclusion—a frequently difficult step.

We cannot critically evaluate until we find the conclusion! Let's see how we go about looking for that very important structural element. Attention: A conclusion is the message that the speaker or writer wishes you to accept.

Searching for the Author's or Speaker's Conclusion To identify the conclusion, the critical thinker must ask, "What is the writer or speaker trying to prove? Any answer to the question provided by the speaker or writer will be the conclusion. In searching for a conclusion, you will be looking for a statement or set of statements that the writer or speaker wants you to believe.

She wants you to believe the conclusion on the basis of her other statements. In short, the basic structure of persuasive communication or argument is: This because of that. This refers to the conclusion; that refers to the support for the conclusion.

This structure represents the process of inference. Conclusions are inferred; they are derived from reasoning. Conclusions are ideas that require other ideas to support them. Thus, whenever someone claims something is true or ought to be done and provides no statements to support her claim, that claim is not a conclusion because no one has offered any basis for belief. In contrast, unsupported claims are what we refer to as mere opinions.

It would be a good idea for you to read it again. Understanding the nature of a conclusion is an essential step toward critical reading and listening. Let's look closely at a conclusion and at the inference process. Here is a brief paragraph; see whether you can identify the conclusion, then the statements that support it. Factory farming should not be legal. There are other more natural ways to produce needed food supply.

It is her conclusion. The author supports this belief with another: "There are other more natural ways to pro- duce needed food supply. It is not the conclusion because it is used to prove something else.

To believe one statement the conclusion because you think it is well supported by other beliefs is to make an inference. When people engage in this process, they are reasoning; the conclusion is the outcome of this reasoning. Sometimes, communicators will not make their conclusions explicit; in such cases you will have to infer the conclusion from what you believe the author is trying to prove by the set of ideas she has presented.

It is the destination that the writer or speaker wants you to choose. Your ongoing concern is: Should I accept that conclusion on the basis of what is supporting the claim? Clues to Discovery: How to Find the Conclusion There are a number of clues to help you identify the conclusion. Because a conclusion is always a response to an issue, it will help you find the conclusion if you know the issue. We dis- cussed earlier how to identify the issue.

First, look at the title. Next, look at the opening paragraphs. If this technique does not help, skimming several pages may be necessary. The conclusion will frequently be pre- ceded by indicator words that announce a conclusion is coming. When you see these indicator words, take note of them.

They tell you that a conclusion may follow. A list of such indicator words follows: consequently suggests that hence therefore points to the conclusion that thus the point I'm trying to make is it follows that it is highly probable that shows that proves that indicates that the truth of the matter is Read the following passage; then identify and highlight the indicator words.

By doing so, you will have identified the statements containing the conclusion. Because of the wording of the Constitution, it follows that prayer should not be allowed in public schools. When the schools favor any particular religion, they are hampering the freedom of those who embrace a different religion.

The idea of freedom of religion is what the country was founded on. You should have highlighted the following phrase: it follows. The conclu- sion follows these words. Unfortunately, many written and spoken communications do not intro- duce the conclusion with indicator words.

However, when you write, you should draw attention to your thesis with indicator words. Those words act as a neon sign, drawing attention to the point you want the reader to accept.

Clue No. Conclusions tend to occupy certain loca- tions. The first two places to look are at the beginning and at the end. Many writers begin with a statement of purpose, containing what they are trying to prove.

Others summarize their conclusions at the end. If you are reading a long, complex passage and are having difficulty seeing where it is going, skip ahead to the end. Often writers, speakers, or Internet sites take predictable positions on issues. Knowing probable biases of the source and the background of authors can be especially valuable clues when the conclusion is not explicit.

Be espe- cially alert to information about organizations with which writers or speakers may be associated. Ask, "Does the author want us to draw an implied conclusion from the information com- municated? Critical Thinking and Your Own Writing and Speaking Because readers of your writing will be looking for your thesis or conclusion, help them by giving it the clarity it deserves.

It is the central message you want to deliver. Emphasize it; leave no doubt about what it actually is. Making your conclusion easily identifiable not only makes a reader's task easier, it also may improve the logic of your writing.

An effective way to emphasize the conclusion is to insert it at the beginning or end of your essay and precede it with an indicator word. In addition, take a close look at your conclusion to make certain that it is a direct response to the issue you intended to address. For example, suppose the issue you are attempting to address is: Will owning a pet increase how long we live? If your conclusion is: "yes, it will increase our life span by an average of 15 years," there is a match between issue and conclusion.

But were your con- clusion, instead, that pets bring joy to the lives of everyone who owns them, your reasoning is confused. The latter conclusion is responding to a different issue, namely, do pets bring joy to our lives?

Passage 1 Home schooling is a valid concept if the parent makes teaching a full time job, and has the insight, knowledge and patience to do so. However, the truth of the matter is that few parents who home school their child are capable of doing so. Parents may choose to pull their student out of public schools for the wrong rea- sons.

Sometimes, when children are a discipline problem, the parents will pull them out of school rather than tolerating the rules associated with the punish- ment. Such a motivation does not speak well for the probable results of the home schooling that follows. In addition, when there are no other adults to monitor what is going on at home, it is likely that if there is a case of abuse in the home that it will go unnoticed.

Society needs to know whether these children are getting the education and treatment they deserve. Passage 2 Television advertising agencies are very clever in the way that they construct ads. Often the ads are similar to the cartoons that the children enjoy. Children see these characters interacting with a certain product and associate their affection for the character with affection for the product.

The companies do not want the children to perceive a difference between the shows they are watching and the advertisements. By using this strategy, these companies take advantage of the fact that children are often not able to discriminate between the cartoons and the ads and do not understand that these things offered come at a cost.

Often the adver- tising is about sugary snacks or fatty foods, leading the children down a path to bad health. Advertising geared towards children should be regulated - j u s t as there are regulations now about tobacco and alcohol ads targeted at children. Passage 3 Should the public be shown actual courtroom trials on television? It seems as though the system can easily be corrupted by having cameras in the courtroom. Victims are hesitant enough when testifying in front of a small crowd, but their knowledge that every word is being sent to countless homes would increase the likelihood that they would simply refuse to testify.

There is little to no assumed innocence for the accused when their trial is put on television. Thus, leave the cam- eras out of the courtrooms, and let the public view sitcom drama based off of the legal system.

Sample Responses Passage 1 The author states her conclusion in the second sentence of the passage. The con- clusion is identified by the phrase, "the truth of the matter is".

The author does not explicitly state the issue, but it can be inferred by the conclusion and the reasons. There are listed reasons in the second paragraph that suggest why some parents' motivation to home school their children would lend to an ineffective home school- ing experience. This example is prescriptive because it asks what ought to be done. Passage 2 There are no indicator words to point towards die conclusion, but a good place to look for the conclusion is either at the beginning or end of the excerpt.

In this case, the very last statement is the conclusion, and you can tell it is the conclusion be- cause it gives finality to the passage using the phrase "should be". This phrase also indicates that this is a prescriptive issue. It is not talking about the way things are or are not, but how they ought to be.

The issue is assumed from the conclusion and from the preceding statements explaining why the author came to her conclusion. Before you can evaluate an author's argument, you must clearly identify the issue and conclusion. How can you evaluate an argument if you don't know exactly what the author is trying to persuade you to believe? Finding an author's main point is the first step in deciding whether you will accept or reject it.

Reasons provide answers for our human curiosity about why someone makes a particular decision or holds a particular opinion. Every class should conclude with student evaluations. A pig is smarter than a mule. Employers should be able to fire any employee who refuses to take a drug test. Those three claims are each missing something. We may or may not agree with them, but in their current form they are neither weak nor strong.

None of the claims contains an explanation or rationale for why we should agree. Thus, if we heard someone make one of those three assertions, we would be left hungry for more. What is missing is the reason or reasons responsible for the claims. Reasons are beliefs, evidence, metaphors, analogies, and other statements offered to support or justify conclusions.

They are the statements that together form the basis for creating the credibility of a conclusion. Chapter 2 gave you some guidelines for locating two very important parts of the struc- ture of an argument—the issue and the conclusion. This chapter focuses on techniques for identifying the third essential element of an argument— the reasons. When a writer has a conclusion she wants you to accept, she must present reasons to persuade you that she is right and to show you why. For example, when someone asserts that we should exclude inexperienced lawyers from representing those charged with felonies, this assertion should be met with the challenge, "Why do you say that?

The person's reasons may be either strong or weak, but you will not know until you have asked the question and identified the reasons.

If the answer is "because I think so," you should be dissatisfied with the argument, because the "reason" is a mere restatement of the conclusion.

However, if the answer is evidence concerning serious mistakes made by inexperienced lawyers in felony cases, you will want to consider such evidence when you evaluate the conclusion. Remember: You cannot determine the worth of a conclusion until you identify the reasons. Identifying reasons is a particularly important step in critical thinking.

An opinion cannot be evaluated fairly unless we ask why it is held and get a satisfactory response. Focusing on reasons requires us to remain open to and tolerant of views that might differ from our own. If we reacted to conclusions rather than to reasoning, we would tend to stick to the conclusions we brought to the discussion or essay, and those conclusions that agree with our own would receive our rapid assent.

If we are ever to re-examine our own opinions, we must remain curious, open to the reasons provided by those people with opinions that we do not yet share. Jj Critical Question: What are the reasons? We will use the concept in a very different manner. An argument is a combination of two forms of statements: a conclusion and the rea- sons allegedly supporting it. The partnership between reasons and conclusion establishes a person's argument. It is something we provide because we care about how people live their lives and what they believe.

Our continual improvement depends on someone's caring enough about us to offer us argu- ments and to evaluate the ones we make. Only then will we be able to develop as thoughtful people. Sometimes, an argument will consist of a single reason and a conclusion; often, however, several reasons will be offered to support the conclusion.

What Are the Reasons? Attention: Reasons are explanations or rationales for why we should believe a particular conclusion. As we use the terms, argument and reasoning mean the same thing—the use of one or more ideas to support another idea. Thus when a communication lacks reasons, it is neither an argument nor an example of reasoning. Conse- quently, only arguments and reasoning can be logically flawed. Because a reason by itselfis an isolated idea, it cannot reflect a logical relationship.

Those who provide them hope to convince us to believe certain things or act in certain ways. Consequently, they call for a reaction. We can imitate the sponge or the gold prospector, but we ordinarily must respond somehow. Critical thinking is required to determine the extent of quality in an argument.

Failure to identify either component destroys the opportunity to evaluate the argument. We cannot evaluate what we cannot identify. That last point deserves some repetition and explanation.

There is little purpose in rushing critical thinking. In fact, the philosopher Wittgenstein suggests that when one bright person addresses another, each should first say "Wait!

Initiating the Questioning Process The first step in identifying reasons is to approach the argument with a ques- tioning attitude, and the first question you should ask is a why question. You have identified the conclusion; now you wish to know why the conclusion makes sense. If a statement does not answer the question, "Why does the writer or speaker believe that?

To function as a reason, a state- ment or group of statements must provide support for a conclusion. First we will find the conclusion; then we will ask the appropriate why question. Remember your guidelines for finding the conclusion. The indicator words for the conclusion have been italicized. What follows "Therefore' answers the question raised in statement 1. Thus, the conclusion is statement 5 ". Attention: An argument consists of a conclusion and the reasons that allegedly support it.

We then ask the question, "Why does the writer or speaker believe the conclusion? In this particular case, the writer provides us with evidence as reasons. Statements 3 and 4 jointly provide the evidence; that is, together they provide support for the conclusion. Together they serve as the reason for the conclusion. Thus, we can paraphrase the reason as: A majority of surveyed teachers believe that metal detectors would help the school's level of safety.

Now, try to find the reasons in the following paragraph. Again, first find the conclusion, highlight it, and then ask the why question. There is no obvious indicator word for the conclusion in the paragraph, but the author is against genetic screening of embryos.

The conclusion is: "Genetic screening of embryos is morally wrong. The major reason given is that "People do not have the right to decide to terminate a potential life based on a set of their preferred criteria. Put yourself in her position and ask yourself, "Why am I in favor of this conclusion that I am sup- porting? If you can paraphrase the answer, you have prob- ably discovered her reasons.

As you determine a communicator's reasoning structure, you should treat any idea that seems to be used to support her conclusion as a reason, even if you do not believe it provides support for the conclusion. At this stage of critical thinking, you are trying to identify the argument. Because you want to be fair to the person who made the argument, it makes good sense to use the principle of charity.

If the writer or speaker believed she was providing sup- port for the conclusion with some evidence or logic, then we should at least consider the reasoning.

There will be plenty of time later to evaluate the rea- soning carefully. Words That Identify Reasons As was the case with conclusions, there are certain words that will typically indicate that a reason will follow. Remember: The structure of reasoning is this, because of that. Thus, the word because, as well as words synonymous with and similar in function to it, will frequently signal the presence of reasons. A list of indicator words for reasons follows: as a result of for the reason that because of the fact that in view of is supported by because the evidence is Kinds of Reasons There are many different kinds of reasons, depending on the kind of issue.

Many reasons will be statements that present evidence. By evidence, we mean specific information that someone uses to furnish "proof for something she is trying to claim is true. Communicators appeal to many kinds of evidence to "prove their point. You will often want to ask, "What kind of evidence is needed to support this claim? You should know that there are no uniform "codes of evidence" applicable to all cases of serious reasoning. A more detailed treatment of evidence appears in Chapters 8 - 1 1.

When a speaker or writer is trying to support a descriptive conclusion, the answer to the why question will typically be evidence. The following example provides a descriptive argument; try to find the author's reasons. You should have identified the first statement as the conclusion. It is a descriptive statement about the large number of Americans who are obese. The rest of the paragraph presents the evidence—the reason for the conclu- sion.

Remember: The conclusion itself will not be evidence; it will be a belief supported by evidence or by other beliefs. In prescriptive arguments, reasons are typically either general, prescrip- tive statements or descriptive beliefs or principles.

The use of these kinds of statements to support a conclusion in a prescriptive argument is illustrated in the following: 1 In today's society, there are all sorts of regulations on media, such as televi- sion ratings. The conflict here is about whether television ratings are desirable. The author argues that if society really is concerned about what children are watch- ing, then it should implement the use of items such as the V-chip, as stated in sentence 7.

Sentences 2 and 3 jointly form one reason, a descriptive belief: The televi- sion ratings are not significant enough to affect change, and they may even encourage some to watch more harmful shows than they would have otherwise watched. The warnings are vague and can leave people thinking that the show may not be that "bad. Sentence 6 provides a third reason: Television ratings cannot be enforced. There is no officer on duty other than parents, and if they do not agree with the ratings or are not around, the ratings are useless.

These last two reasons are general beliefs. If the argument were expanded by the author, the beliefs themselves might be supported by evidence in some form. Keeping the Reasons and Conclusions Straight Much reasoning is long and not very well organized. Sometimes a set of reasons will support one conclusion, and that conclusion will function as the main reason for another conclusion. Reasons may be supported by other reasons. In especially complicated arguments, it is frequently difficult to keep the structure straight in your mind as you attempt to critically evaluate what you have read.

To overcome this problem, try to develop your own organizing procedure for keeping the reasons and conclusions separate and in a logical pattern. We have mentioned a number of techniques for you to use in developing a clear picture of the reasoning structure.

If some other technique works bet- ter for you, by all means use it. The important point is to keep the reasons and conclusions straight as you prepare to evaluate. Clues for Identifying and Organizing the Reasoning of a Passage 1. Circle indicator words. Underline the reasons and conclusion in different colors of ink, or highlight the conclusion and underline the reasons.

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The Right Question Institute makes it possible for all people to learn to ask better questions and participate more effectively in key decisions. The Question Formulation Technique, created by the Right Question Institute, is a simple yet powerful strategy to teach students how to formulate their own questions. Learn the Question Formulation Technique today, facilitate the strategy tomorrow, and watch students become more curious, engaged learners.

Learn how asking questions and partnering in the decision making process can fundamentally change how individuals participate in democracy. Rothstein and Santana have put together a straightforward and accessible book about what seems like a simple idea — get kids to ask questions, questions they care about.

The art of making questions, nearly lost, is thankfully revived in [Make Just One Change]. Why do you think we ask questions? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Topics Reading. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate Containerid S Donor internetarchivebookdrive Edition 4th ed. There are no reviews yet. Be the first one to write a review.