Reading to Write: Four Questions

I owe much of what I know about writing to my undergrad thesis advisor at Harvard, Dr. Thomas Ponniah. When I first asked him whether he’d advise me, he posed a question back: “Will you turn in ten pages to me every week?” He cut me off before I could answer—“Go home, think about it, and tell me tomorrow.” Of course I said yes, with no idea how I would manage. But he didn’t leave me empty handed; he gave me the invaluable four-question method, which lets you turn your research into usable text on the spot.

I wrote about philosophy, which means I had to figure out my own ideas about a bunch of other people’s ideas. Here, you can’t just wax sophomoric about some dead guy’s musings; you have to wade through a lineage of interlocutors, deciding whose ideas to engage with and whose to ignore. Like in any field, you crack open one dusty classic, and suddenly you’re drowning in a breeding pit of claims, counterclaims, caveats, and contradictions. To survive with a worthwhile text of your own, you have to learn how to read to write.

Here’s the technique—relevant for anyone who needs to digest masses of words efficiently and painlessly. For each text you read, open up a new page in Word, copy the four bolded questions below, and fill them in as you read with complete, intelligible sentences and paragraphs. When I first did this as an undergrad, my ten pages a week became easy and enjoyable to write. It trained me to only ever read a text once, picking up everything I needed on the first pass.
 

1) What is the question?

Every good piece of writing has a central question or set of questions. When you read bad writing and think, “So what?” or “Who cares?”, the problem is that the writer has either a dull question or no question at all. A good question is a good motive. What is the writer trying to work out, and why is it interesting to others? If you can’t uncover a clear and pertinent question, you’re dealing with a confused author. Scrap it and look for something better to read.
 

2) What is the main argument?

Find the writer’s question and you’ll whet your interest in their answer—their main argument. In different cultures, the writer comes to the argument at different moments. In English—and most Western writing cultures—we tend to show our cards as early as possible. We tell our reader the main point quickly and then spend the rest of our text proving it through logic and evidence. Find an author’s main point as soon as you can and write it down in a concise paragraph. Even if you disagree, you should be as charitable as possible when writing their claim in your own words. It might become an essential counterargument that you have to build up thoroughly in order to tear down later.
 

3) What is the best proof of the argument?

The argument is like the left jab that makes way for the right cross—the proof. Though it’s the heart of a good piece, the argument is nothing without persuasive evidence. Keep your eyes open for a good metaphor, a convincing quote, or a cogent statistic or two. When you have to discuss the author in your own writing, you’ll want to summarize their argument and cap that off with the most impressive bit of proof you could find.
 

4) What is the connection to my project?

This question should be looming in your mind while you read and answer the other questions: what does all of this have to do with what I am writing? You will probably discover the connections in little bursts of insight. Jot those down in note form as they arise, then come back to turn the fragments into complete sentences later on. This question is usually the most difficult because it makes you not just reflect on what you’re reading but also transform those reflections into clear sentences. It requires a bit of discipline. But fifteen minutes of writing now—while the content is fresh—is worth an hour of writing later. If you try to write about it in a month, you’ll waste the first forty-five minutes reminding yourself what it all had to do with your text.