'Generating Questions' is a method you can think about using when producing a specific assignment, as one way of getting used to the process. Let's take a possible question from a first-year politics course as an example. I don’t necessarily expect you to know anything about the topic below from the point of view of a university politics course. The point of this method is to define your own thoughts as a preliminary to further work.
Imagine working on this title: ‘What is racism? Can it be eradicated?’
You would make a list of as many questions as you could that this title suggested to you. Of course, you would not be expected to answer any of these questions – just to pose them.
- What do we mean by race?
- What are the causes of racism?
- Is racism mainly to do with black and white?
- Is racism an innate human characteristic?
- Are there some societies where racism doesn’t exist?
- Are there different kinds of racism?
- How has racism manifested itself historically?
- Can anyone be racist?
- What is the connection between racism and religious intolerance?
- What effect have laws against racism had?
- Is policy-making and the law an answer?
- How am I personally affected by racism?
- Is there a difference between racism and prejudice?
Generate questions for yourself when you embark on a new course, and as you are about to read a book or article, or attend a lecture. Formulating the questions helps you to be clear about how you conceive the subject and what you hope you will get from the materials and other sources of information. It starts you thinking in a purposeful way as you explore different sources for ideas.
As you embark on your study you can expect to encounter various ways in which you will be helped towards tackling assignment questions. Firstly, your course syllabus or handbook should give you a good idea about how the particular topic of your chosen assignment fits into others.
Lecturers may also suggest appropriate ways in which you might think about the topics. Handouts may direct you to particular readings, or provide a series of different definitions. In discussion groups of various kinds you may be asked to introduce particular topics. This will give you the opportunity to explore your own understanding in the company of others who do not necessarily share your views.
You may find that you have to defend your opinions, or listen to others and change what you think on how you approach a topic. In all of this it is always a good idea to do your own thinking first, to put together and make concrete your ideas, see how they relate to what you are learning at university, and develop them by more thinking and reading.
Here is another example. The topic is "What is happening to the family in modern Indonesia"
Here are some questions (in no particular order) that could help a writer organize his or her thoughts:
- What exactly is 'a family'?
- Parents – parenting – should it be taught?
- What is the impact of different cultures or traditions?
- Are there different models of what is a family?
- What ever happened to the extended family?
- Is the nuclear family on its way out?
- What do we know about the "Ideal family" in ‘TV ads’?
- What are the new kinds of family emerging – e.g. shared parenting, civil partnerships.?
- What about if families are difficult and can be completely dysfunctional?
- Why is there a high rate of divorce?
- Family Christmas – do I want it?
- What does "family values" mean?
- How and why do politicians talk about "family values"?
- Are families in decline?
Thank you Adrian for introducing us with finding ideas by generating questions. So far, I think teenager or people outside already forget about the meaning and the purpose of generating questions. Generating questions as a means of improving our comprehensive. Asking students to create their own questions about something that include 5W1H(who, what, when, where, why, and how). Just to be honest, it is also encourages us as a student to read more actively and keep our eyes on key ideas. Also, people can learn to formulate and respond to questions about situations spontaneously. I am agree with your statement, “You may find that you have to defend your opinions, or listen to others and change what you think on how you approach a topic” . I hope by reading this article or from another article can help us to know more about finding ideas by generating questions and I am sure this article will help me in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think it's perfectly make sense and very useful. By making any possible question to be ask, we can make something out of it. More focused in the writing. By generating ideas it is possible to make a wide-range writing but still in the topic. I think the more idea we can generate, the better material we can use in the writing process. So that in the writing process, we are actually trying to answer those question. But also in generating ideas, we have to have a good knowledge about something. What I mean here, we have to at least be well-read; nothing will help us writing nearly as much as being well-read and well-conversed in our writing process. Generating ideas or generating question could help in anything actually, not necessarily writing but also making step of our life I guess, think of any possibilities before decide what move would we make. Thank you
ReplyDeleteFinding ideas by generating many question related to the topic is the best way to have great understanding of particular topic. If we can make many question of a topic, I think it means that we already have ability to easily understand a topic. More over we can criticize many topic, we can see many problem from different angle. So we can have deeper understanding about the topic, and when some one come and ask us about the topic, it will easy for us to explain about that. Actually by making many question of an idea its train us to be good writer, because of what? this is absolutely give us many reference in which we need to write down the topic about it. If we do generating many question of a topic continuously, I believe that we can be good writer, we can persuade people by just writing something. I ever heard about a true story about 4 men that just sit down and write about their opinion and they can easy influence people to do something, I heard that they write it in twitter.
ReplyDeleteI think this ability is great because so many practise that they do before, writing in public means that we should be ready for many question that will be ask by our reader, and by generating question continuously we can prevent about the question that probably will be asked by the reader more over for they who want to defeat us.
I think generating questions is a way to understand about a topic, it is a very bad situation if there is a student who cannot understand the topic and they do not ask the lecturer. Generating questions is a process to understand the topic, when student ask a question that’s mean that they don’t have a clear understanding about the topic, after the lecturer answer it they will get a better information about that topic, in example: I am a student, when I found difficulties when I study, I will ask a question to the lecturer, it is better for me to ask a question to the lecturer than I don’t understand about the topic, after the lecturer give me the answer I will remember it and I will have a better understanding about the topic. There is a problem with generating question, some students are shy to ask a question to their lecturer, they afraid if they ask something that is everybody knows and they don’t know, they don’t want to be labeled as a student who has a less intelligent than the others.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with all the comments given above. To be honest, I had never really used this method or approach to find my way into a topic in the past. Sometimes I used a mind map as a starting point, but after doings this exercise I find this method not only to be more fun but also to be more efficient. It was quite interesting to see how we were developing questions. It took quite a while until someone wrote down a first question. Also, the first few questions sounded already quite specific about certain to the topic related aspects. Maybe we were just trying too hard, but basic questions, such as “what exactly is…?” “How do you define…?” or “Who claimed this statement?” popped up in our heads quite late. However, we then had suddenly tons of questions. I think I will use this approach more often in the future, especially to tackle more complex and wide topics.
ReplyDeleteI seldom discuss about this topic, I think this is one of the all good topics in this blog. This topic teaches us how to be critical in every situation. For example, if we want to know about someone, we should know her/him very well. Making many questions and list them down, after that take the conclusion. Many cases were not fairly solved. One of factors that caused that is the analyzer not really critical enough to know all of that problems. May police in Jakarta are not doing the job effectively. Maybe they think why we should doing this complicated job if we can earn money easily by giving the speeding tickets in every unlucky person. By giving the speeding tickets, the police can earn Rp 100.000,00 . Can you imagine if in one day there are 20 people and how much their income in a month? That is not good example. But in my opinion, this topic is very good because it teaches us how to be more critical than before. And it really helpful.
ReplyDeleteGenerating question is a good way to understand a topic. Generating question helps us to do our assignment. You only need to make a list of question about the topic. If we make a lot of question, we will find a new idea about the topic. So, we can expand the topic and find the solution or the result of the topic. Generating question makes the writing process easier. Sometimes, we can’t find an idea about a specific topic. We can try this way to solve your problem. After you make a list of question, you need to find the answer. How to find the answer? You can find the answer in a lot of resources such as the book or the internet. Reading also helps us to learn more about the topic. We will get a lot of information, the new fact, the theory, or the hypothesis. So, I will try this way to do my assignment.
ReplyDeleteHello, My name is Heza Ramanda, and I would like to give my opinion regarding to this topic.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic, really. Generating ideas using questions is really a good idea. Why? By generating the questions, we could make a skeleton of an essay, or writing. As the example shows, after we generate those questions, we answer it, and we make a sentence using those answers we got. And to defend your opinions is also important, and don’t let someone opinions cause you to lose confidence on your own opinions. The other advantage of using generating questions, is that you could easily understand the topic, and by understand the topic, you could easily present it in front of your friend or colleagues. It also can help you memorize the topic and your writing though, Which gives a lot of advantage for the one who using this theory. But well, the negative thing, about this method, is that it won’t be easy to find the right question. And I guess that’ll be all. Thankyou.
Same with Tobi, I had never really used generating questions method before. Whenever I make assignment, I just write words that popped out in my mind. Thank you, Sir, I learn about this method and I found this very useful to help me with my writing skill. I think it helps us to improve our critical and creative thinking skills. It forces us to be more critical towards something and I like this method. We would think, "what is that?", "why was that happen?", etc. Aside for making assignment, this method is flexible and fit to various types of texts. When we read text, this method is kinda important because we determine whether the answers to our questions can be found in the text or whether we will need to infer the answer from the text. The generating question method has captivated our imagination and defines our own thoughts as a prelimary to further work, just like you’ve stated above, Sir.
ReplyDeleteI think generating question is a great way to find idea. Thank you Sir for introducing this way to us. I never thought about questioning my self could help me to find idea for writing. By keep questioning, I know that some questions that I don’t know the answer. I think this method can be used too in learning. Sometimes we ask about questions that we never thought about before. Sometimes that can be silly questions but we don’t know the answers. By questioning our self, we can choose the suitable questions for our topic. Then, we can find answers from books, Internet, asking to the experts or someone who know about that and other resources. I think the great advantage about this method is we can know about things that we didn’t know before. But, sometimes I feel hard to find questions that are related to the topic. I think this method needs lot of practice.
ReplyDeleteAdrian had already given us an explanation to make an essay easier by generating question last week, and we have already practiced to make a question according to some topics. Yes, as it mentioned above in the article, 'Generating Questions' is a method you can think about using when producing a specific assignment, as one way of getting used to the process. As an example, if the topic is about "Are rear-facing airplane seats safer?" we can make a lot of questions to help us understand the topic, like does the aerodynamic affect the safety? What country produces rear facing seats? What are the differences between front facing and rear facing seats? What kind of plane that uses this method? And so on. After that question has been made, we can search the answer for each question. Next, we could summarize it and use it to broaden our perspective of the topic.
ReplyDeleteThank you Mr Adrian for posting this article in this blog so I can read it. I think this article give me a lot of advice about how to generating ideas and make me shape my critical thinking. To be honest, I find it hard to get more ideas about how can I write something longer. It is hard for me to give and put more ideas in my essays. I also think that if we can find something that we can ask in that topic, we will find the answer and the result is we understand that topic clearly. Now I know that we cannot accept something easily, sometimes we must be critical and try to be more detailed person by make questions like that. The two examples above are making me think over and over again. We cannot find the answer by read textbooks because the answer is not exact and there is no right or wrong. We will find the right answer by seeing and being critical about around you and think in general perspective whether it is right or not.
ReplyDeleteI think this is one of the most effective ways to generate ideas in writing essays as it allows us to let the ideas flows. But even though it’s very effective it also has some disadvantages.
ReplyDeleteThe advantages of this kind of strategy are it allows the writer to be guided with the question that they’ve been generating in the pre-writing stage. And also it allows the writer to be more conscious about the topic and thus they will not deviate from the main issues the questions.
The disadvantages in using this kind of strategy is that it took some time to generate the ideas where if we we’re given time allotment in doing that essays it will not be very effective. Another disadvantages is in long essays if we’re to do an assessment of something this kind of strategy is not very effective as in that kind of question what we need is something like a mind map where it allows us to write freely with the mid map as our scope in writing.
I guess it is a good idea to reveal an idea by using self-questioning way. It's because our self has a lot of ideas inside our mind but sometime it is hard for us on presenting it to others. It's just like stuck in our head, where it become an obstacle that makes the idea cannot pop out of our mind. By generating question to our self, we can figure how the idea supposed to be delivered, or even how it's supposed to be served. Sometimes when you generate question to yourself, there's a slight chance that there will be new ideas come through your mind. By doing so, we can find the idea in a short time and we won't be facing a serious homework issues especially about making ideas. It is also widely believe that generating self-question can make us remember more about the idea that we’re going to present. So, start generating your question, and find out your idea!
ReplyDeleteI would like to thank to you Adrian. I appreciate this post really much. I think this post is trying to teach us to be more critical in all of situation. In my opinion, we are not high school students anymore, we have to be more critical than before. In college life, we are forced to be more active in every situation. In this article, I think Adrian is trying to make us easier to do assignments in our another subject like statistic, economics, business, and many more. And I think it is better if we learn this article. Because not only in college life, if we are already graduated from this university, in work life is require to be more initiative and to be more critical than before. It is better to put your opinion too and put the summary on. The lecturer in another subject will appreciate you much if you do these tips. To make the good paper, if you have assignment to interview a business, you have to make that paper correctly. You have to combine all qualified questions, opinions, and also the conclusion. So you will get the good paper.
ReplyDeleteAfter being introduced to this method by Adrian, and practice using this method with my friends for several times in class, I’m really interested. I personally believe that finding idea by generating question is really effective. I have applied this method in my writing. Before writing, I generate questions that are related to the topic first. And magically, I can find a lot of ideas using this method. The first thing that I usually do before writing is I will generate simple questions about the topic, about what is this topic referring to, or about words that I don’t really understand about. After generating questions about the basic, I usually start generating questions that dig further about the topic until the complicated ones. By generating the questions, I find it really easy to write about any topic, any discussion. Because I already have ideas about what I’m going to write and what I’m going to share based on the topic. I hope you can introduce us to any other great methods in writing Adrian, so that we can boost our ability and make great writings. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteA simple thing can lead to a big result. I think this quote can represent the way generating questions work in essay making process. It is a simple thing to do, but sometimes we underestimate it. We think that it is not important; all we have to do is just think and write as our mind flow. This kind of situation usually brings the author to make an unsystematically essay, because we just write all over our mind. We don’t care about every aspects and details, whereas it might be the important one.
ReplyDeleteGenerating questions helps us to know the problem and what we will write before starting to write an essay. It is urgent to put the details and problem that we talk about in a lot of point of view. However, it is not easy to start an essay by such a method that we don’t usually do. So, we need practice to generate questions when we write an essay. If you are already getting used to generate questions, you don’t even need to write all the questions, you can just put the questions on your mind.
Talking about finding ideas reminds me about my EWS class with Adrian, there I taught to start finding much ideas by making a self question. After that I realized that generalizing questions is realy useful due to make some ideas. I had also did it some other time when I was just sitting in some coffee place and I started to think about some problems and I started to make or generalize some questions, by that time I got some ideas from the questions. I think this is one of the best ways to finding ideas. Because by generating questions there would come some ideas like suddenly passing across our mind and yeah we got the idea. I am so thankful to Adrian who has asked me to try to generate questions to find ideas.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, writing essay in an examination can be so hard. Maybe you will find writing it easy but the result is not clear of appear to be an ineffective essay. With two hours duration of examination, you will get distracted easily by the time. As the result, you will be in a rush in writing your essay.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with this topic. It is very helpful to begin your essay writing. I always begin by highlighting the key point of the title or main question then later on generate questions from these key points.
As the result, I will have lots of questions and I can simply choose the most relevant questions to be my main topic.
To summarize, generating questions will help you to minimize your time in an examination and make you stick to the topic, as you already know what you want to say. Also, don’t forget to always find the connection between the questions you choose.
Thank you sir for posting the article “how to finding ideas by generating question”. I think that generating question is the next part after brainstorming; first we get all of the abstract ideas then we distribute all of the ideas to the question, using the 5W1H so we can get the main idea or main point about the article. But honestly till now I’ve never use this method for the assignment such as essay or comment on this blog, because It might take a long time for me, so I just write it down, (but for the examination, I think that I will use this methods to gain many ideas).
ReplyDeleteGenerating question is the best way for us to have better understanding in the topic, and it will improve our critical thinking because it forces us to keep asking before we accept some ideas, like: what will happen if I accept those ideas, what are the benefits for me, and who gave those ideas, etc.
This lesson is very useful for everyone. Honestly, I’m still confused about the differences between this method and the one that we used in brainstorming. I think the purpose is kinda the same. It can improve your creativity. After I tried this method in the class, I find it easier to bring up more ideas by generating questions. Sometimes you don’t understand what you read, and there will a lot of questions going around your head. That’s the first step for using this method. When you start generating questions, the topic will be clearer. Generating questions will give you more ideas about the topic so you can understand well and decide what you’re going to think or do next. Generating questions needs creativity to find the questions that will help you. For example like how we can choose the questions that will help us to understand the topic, or how we think about another alternative that will give us more informations. By using this way, you will get more knowledge. That’s why I think this method will give you a lot of benefits.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it is hard for me to do this kind of strategy when I wanted to write something and I don't know why. It happens when I taking an exam, maybe because I'm too pressured? I think yes. Generating questions, it is the same as brainstorming; By generating 1 ideas it will lead to another ideas which can to another ideas and goes to another ideas again. Ideas-ception. Anyway, by generating questions from 1 topic (or more) to find ideas it help us for writer to become more critical because eventually the ideas will need more detailed answer which sometimes demanded by reader.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I’m kind of person that sometimes find difficulties when writing an essay for assignment. But, whenever I start to practise with the methods like Adrian ever tough at the class last week about finding ideas through brainstorming and generating questions make me know what should I do to acquire all my hardship when brief the ideas. Personally, I prefer to choose the method of generating questions before writing. Because, asking questions related to the topic is the easiest way to understand about what is the problem and how to solve it in making “well-organized” essay. Sometimes, plays with questions indirectly can make us easier finding brilliant ideas based on the attractive questions appaeared in our mind. Construct questions about what we are want to write will help us improving our skill in writing for academic purpose, it can be a good study method because we are linked to develope the answers into paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteMy name is Mhd Heickal and I would like to write down my comment on this article. Thank you sir for shared to us another method to generate an idea.
ReplyDeleteThis method is usually used by children to acknowledge their growing-creativity. I know it will illuminate them or to trigger their ideas. By creating a question, literally we have to seek for the answer.
For the examples of racism that written above, actually we can think, what did we get from the racism? What is the benefit to treat someone base on their race or what else. It can motivate us to think more.
It works not only to generating an idea, but also to keep us polite while we were talking to someone, we have to think more, what should he ask, what topic that we can talk about, etc.
Or when we asked to make a thesis, we have to think what is, where is, how can, when did, who are, and why (5 w + 1 h). This is also a method to generate an idea by make a question.
And in the end, I’m so glad to know this article can give me another method to generate an idea.