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Subject:Questions as headings From:Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- CHISP -dot- NET> Date:Fri, 23 Oct 1998 23:13:32 -0700
Peter Collins asked:
>Ben, Simon, Tim, Leonard, Doug and the two Mikes, all have worked the
>subject of Metatext around statement-oriented presentations. Where should
>the Socratic method appear in this discussion? Are rhetoric questions
>metatext? Whether they are or not, are they useful?
I *occasionally* use questions as headings, but I'm wary of them, for
reasons I'm having trouble articulating--which is to say, perhaps for some
rather unexamined reasons. I think I use questions as headings mainly in
these two places: (1) In troubleshooting guides, e.g. "I won my case in
court but the defendant hasn't paid me. What should I do?" (2) In
overviews, where the heading sometimes takes the form of a "what is"
question, like "What is Datablaster 2000?"
These types of questions are not metatext in the sense I meant earlier,
btw. They're sentences about the subject matter, not sentences about the
document. "How do I get wine stains out of carpets?" is a question about
getting wine stains out of carpets, not about a section or chapter. It
nicely puts content into a reader's mind and creates an expectation for
what is to come, helping the reader interpret what is to come, all without
pausing to enter and exit a meta-realm. Metatext in the form of a question
would be, "What is this section about?" (But I never object to metatext in
headings. That's what headings are for.)
Feeling around, here's what I've come up with for why I'm skittish about
making heavy use of questions as metatext. Sorry if this is somewhat less
than coherent. Maybe it will stimulate some more pro and con ideas.
1. It's too conversational. A user's manual for most products needs to
read like the Voice of God--infallible, impersonal, implicitly trustworthy.
Getting chatty with the reader makes you a member of a club that the reader
could join--and therefore not a source of privileged, authoritative
information. In the much-neglected other forms of technical writing, such
as design documents, protocol specifications, and many other things, a
conversational style would be particularly jarring.
2. To ask a question itself requires knowledge. This is a problem with
many FAQs. "How do I calciferate the veeblefetzer?" Calciferate?
Veeblefetzer? What's all this? Why would I want to do such a thing?
Since questions as headings are written in the reader's voice, they imply
that the reader already has the knowledge needed to ask the question:
knowledge of each of the terms, knowledge of the possibility of doing the
job asked about, and knowledge of why this job is useful. It then becomes
strange to provide this information in an answer. If someone asked you,
"How do I calciferate the veeblefetzer?", it would be almost insulting to
answer by saying, "A veeblefetzer is a type of wood stove originally
designed in the 1930s. To function properly, it must be coated with a
1'-thick layer of calcium. Applying this coat is called calciferation.
The first step is to..." A normal, noun-phrase heading, on the other hand,
naturally raises these questions in the reader's mind, making it very
natural to follow it with just this sort of introductory content. Plus,
the heading doesn't exclude readers who don't already have this knowledge.
Note that this implies that when you can be sure that the reader does have
this kind of knowledge, as in a troubleshooting guide, a question can be
very effective as a heading. That's because it's the very question that
the reader was thinking. "Wow, it's like you read my mind!" But this only
works when the reader was thinking of a specific question.
3. Frequent use of rhetorical questions somehow upsets the flow. Your
message shows just how jarring rhetorical questions can be if used heavily.
I know you're not proposing going that far, but a rhetorical question calls
a great deal of attention to itself. It's a very strong caesura. If
speaking aloud, you would naturally follow it with a pregnant pause. It
asks the reader stop a moment to ponder it and wonder how it will be
answered. This works wonderfully when rhetorical questions are spaced out
far and wide among normal, smoothly flowing discursive prose. But frequent
use of them punctuates the flow too frequently, preventing the easy, smooth
rhythm of good technical writing from taking form.
By the way, are you sure you want to say "the Socratic method" to describe
the use of questions to introduce answers that you provide? Just a
quibble, but traditionally the term means teaching by asking questions and
letting the students figure out the answers for themselves, or, more
traditionally still, feigning ignorance of a subject to help people
discover their own ignorance. (A highly overrated method of teaching,
IMHO.)
