Chapter 2
The Structure of a Good Question
Effective questioning is about accuracy and efficiency. To the lessons I’ve already provided, I am going to add a couple more on how to begin a question, the importance of excising bias from your questioning, and how long to make a question.
USING INTERROGATIVES
A good question should always start with an interrogative. People commonly fail to use this most basic structural element of a good question—who, what, where, when, how, or why. Openers tend to be “Do you...” and “Could you...” which elicit no more than a “Yes” or a “No.” On the other hand, narrative responses elicited by an interrogative are rich with additional information and leads.
Briefly, here is the difference, in relation to the accuracy and efficiency of collecting information:
A well-structured exchange would look like this:
What did you do last night?
I went to the theater.
What else?
Just that.
What theater did you go to last night?
The Fox Theater.
Where is the Fox?
Downtown Denver, across from the convention center.
What did you see?
A revival of Equus.
In contrast, these questions lead nowhere:
Did you do something last night?
Yes.
Go anywhere?
Went downtown.
Just to hang out?
No. Had tickets to the theater.
Yes.
You might think I should stop the discussion right here. After all, you may assume there aren’t many things can you say about using interrogatives except, “Start your questions with them.” Actually, the discussion is just beginning, because the proper use of interrogatives means that the questioner is demonstrating curiosity without prejudice. Using other questioning forms, as well as using interrogatives followed by certain qualifying information, reflects curiosity with prejudice and perhaps even an agenda, such as the kind that hosts of so-called news interview programs have with guests of an opposite political leaning.
I can hear the protests from where I’m sitting. You are thinking back to some of the great interviewers and their questioning style and ready to fight me on the rule of interrogatives—because those great questioners violated it frequently. Mike Wallace was one of the top television interrogators of all time during his years on 60 Minutes, and even prior that 40-year stint. He had a reputation for aggressive questioning and was notorious for, among other things, bringing Barbra Streisand to tears and angering the Ayatollah Khomeini to the point where he ordered the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Although the narratives he wrapped around direct questioning were typically tinged with a distinct point of view, his questions were primarily rather neutral. He tended to rely on interrogatives and ask short, pointed questions that drove people into a corner. There is no inherent prejudice in questions such as the following, yet they all provoked an animated response from the interviewee:
• To novelist Ayn Rand, founder of Objectivism: “What is Randism?”1
To then–presidential candidate Ronald Reagan: “How many blacks are there on your top campaign staff, Governor?”2
To entertainer Barbra Streisand: “Why are you so attackable?” and “When are you going to be 50?”3
To former First Lady Nancy Reagan: “What was your husband’s role in Iran-Contra?”4
Mike Wallace was an interrogator, and many of the people he interviewed probably felt as though they were detainees at Guantanamo Bay. In contrast, Mike Wallace’s son Chris, an Emmy-award-winning journalist and host of the program Fox News Sunday, is squarely focused on discovery and discussion. In fact, his style exemplifies discovery questioning. Growing up, Chris Wallace did not have his father as a professional role model. His stepfather, future CBS News President Bill Leonard, was the one who introduced young Chris to journalism by hiring him to help Walter Cronkite at the 1964 Republican National Convention; he was just 16 years old.
Chris Wallace is a master of what I call the journalistic double-dip. He asks good questions, although they might come in pairs; that is, he double-dips, perhaps often not knowing if he will get a chance to ask the person another question after she answers the first one. (This is distinct from a compound question, which I describe in Chapter 3 as one of the “bad” types of questions.)
There is also a lighter side to the discussion of using interrogatives. In reviewing a number of David Letterman interviews, I listened for questions beginning with one of the key words. In interview after interview, it was often the banter that led to comments from the guest rather than Letterman’s questions. And then Maryann singled out an interview that Letterman did with Sasha Baron Cohen in character. He came on the Late Show in 2006 as Borat, the titular character from his movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Perhaps not surprisingly, when Letterman shifted into the persona of someone interviewing a “head of state,” between laughter and wincing, he took a different approach to questioning:
What do we need to know about you?
What should we know about Kazakhstan?
What have you learned about the United States as you’ve traveled around the country?
What are we going to see in the clip, Borat? [He asked this question as part of the introduction to the segment of the movie played on the show, which was about driving lessons in America.]
What state are you in when you this was filmed?5
David Letterman is an entertainer, not a journalist, but when he wore the mantle of a journalist in his interview with Borat, he transformed himself into a good questioner.
In the following subsection, consider my assertion that interrogatives used well lead to unbiased questions, whereas others contain bias and perhaps reflect an agenda. Consider also how straightforward, unbiased questions introduced with an interrogative can come across like daggers—á la Mike Wallace—in contrast to blunt-edged, meandering questions that are actually intended to attack the interviewee and/or manifest a point of view.
CURIOSITY WITH PREJUDICE
In the opening of Chapter 1, I urged you to see questioning as discovery, defined as the expression of open-minded curiosity. That means curiosity without prejudice. You will find yourself automatically turning to interrogatives to begin questions when you consciously avert bias, and largely turning away from them when your judgment about the other person or the topic at hand colors your questioning. Some of the most renowned interviewers of our era illustrate this point.
National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, has been justifiably lauded for her astute interviews, which are a product of meticulous research and seemingly genuine interest in her guests. If there is bias, it tends to be favorable bias, which supports rapport-building with the guest.
Her May 2013 interview with novelist Stephen King began with a question about his latest book, a crime novel: “What do you like about that genre as a reader and as a writer?” That was followed by a string of why, what, and who questions that led to colorful insights on the novel.6
Not all of her interviews took that course, however, and one of the most notorious was with Gene Simmons, lead vocalist of the rock bank KISS. Following a rocky beginning—Simmons criticized her mispronunciation of his Hebrew birth name—the interview quickly became a contentious encounter. In contrast with the Stephen King interview, Gross started out with three “did you” questions. It’s more the style of a prosecutor interrogating a witness than a talk show host interviewing a guest. As the interview progressed, she nearly abandoned interrogatives and asked questions that played into Simmons’s confrontational modus operandi:
TERRY GROSS: Are you trying to say to me that all that matters to you is money?
GENE SIMMONS: I will contend, and you try to disprove it, that the most important thing as we know it on this planet, in this plane, is, in fact, money. Want me to prove it?
TERRY GROSS: Well, let’s cut to the chase. How much—how much money do you have?
GENE SIMMONS: Gee, a lot more than NPR.
TERRY GROSS: Oh, I know. I—you’re very defensive on money, aren’t you?
GENE SIMMONS: No, I’m not, I’m just trying to show you that there’s a big world out there, and reading books is wonderful. I’ve certainly read, well, perhaps as many as you have, but there’s a delusional kind of notion that runs rampant in—
TERRY GROSS: Wait, wait, could we just get something straight?
GENE SIMMONS: Of course.
TERRY GROSS: I’m not here to prove that I’m smart—
GENE SIMMONS: Not you—
TERRY GROSS: I’m not here to prove that you’re not smart or that you don’t read books or can’t make a lot of money—
GENE SIMMONS: This is not about you. You’re being very defensive—why are you doing that?
TERRY GROSS: [laughs] It’s contagious.
GENE SIMMONS: Yeah.
TERRY GROSS: Can we get back to your makeup? What do you use to paint your face, and do you ever break out from that?
GENE SIMMONS: No, it’s actually oil-based. It’s Stein’s makeup...is one of the brand names, but you can use lots of different...lots of things. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question. But no. My skin is more beautiful than yours.
TERRY GROSS: Let’s get to the studded codpiece.
GENE SIMMONS: Oh yes.
TERRY GROSS: Do you have a sense of humor about that?
GENE SIMMONS: No.
TERRY GROSS: Does that seem funny to you? Are you—
GENE SIMMONS: No, it holds in my manhood.
TERRY GROSS: [laughs] That’s right.
GENE SIMMONS: Otherwise it would be too much for you to take. You’d have to put the book down and confront life. The notion is that if you want to welcome me with open arms, I’m afraid you’re also going to have to welcome me with open legs.
TERRY GROSS: That’s a really obnoxious thing to say.
GENE SIMMONS: No it’s not, it’s being—why should I say something behind your back that I can’t tell you to your face?
TERRY GROSS: Wait, it—it—has it come to this? Is this the only way that you can talk to a woman? To do that shtick?7
When I was first exposed to this interview, all Maryann did was read Terry Gross’s questions in the first half of the interview; she did not offer any of Gene Simmons’s answers. Standing alone, the questions seemed dysfunctional and aggressive to me. They suggested that she was coming at him rather than wanting something from him. There was very little sense of discovery as I’ve defined it. In all fairness, of course, a normal human response to being criticized at the outset would be to proceed with some bias—but the point is not whether or not Gross had a normal human response. I’m simply using this exchange to point out how prejudice infects and degrades questioning.
But being the professional she is, Terry Gross turned it around before the interview was over. It’s as though she hit a reset button. After a Simmons rant on the boring nature of NPR, she returned the discussion to KISS and even created an opening for him to talk respectfully about his mother. Her next string of questions relied primarily on interrogatives:
Well I’m going to get back to some questions about KISS, and we’ll see where we get to. One of the things you’ve done on stage is your fire-eating. How and why did you start doing that?
What about throwing up blood?
What was the age of your audience when KISS started to perform? [To this, Simmons responded, “That’s a good question.”]
Do you have any memories of life in Israel?
Were you from an orthodox family?
What’s your mother’s reaction to KISS?
The shift in questioning style to focus on discovery was like an oar turning a boat.
There was no such turning point in Lauren Green’s July 20, 2013 interview with Dr. Reza Aslan on Fox News—one of the most prejudicial interviews I have ever heard. Aslan is a religious scholar and historian who was ostensibly being interviewed about his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Of note is that Aslan has four advanced degrees in his field, including one in the New Testament, and he included roughly 100 pages of endnotes to provide full disclosure on his source material for the book.
Green’s questions themselves were often hotly delivered and interspersed with criticism of the book from other people—suggesting that Green had not read the book herself—and would leave many people wondering about the true intent of the nine-minute interview:
You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?
Why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?
How are your findings different from what Islam actually believes about Jesus?
[After noting a criticism of one person who said that some of Aslan’s claims had “been abandoned and refuted,” Green posed the question,] What do you say to that?
What are your conclusions about Jesus?
[After reading a Twitter comment from someone who criticized the bias of the book and said, “That’s like a having a Democrat writing a book about why Reagan wasn’t a good Republican,” Green asked,] What do you say to that?
Why would a Democrat want to promote democracy by writing about a Republican?8
The structure of the questions is actually fine, and, in reading them without hearing them or the responses, you might easily conclude that the furor over the interview was inflated. Questioning bias does not necessarily emerge from the question alone, however. The style of delivery can change everything. Asking, “Who are you?” can signal anger, fear, amazement, humor, or sarcasm, as well as simple curiosity about a person’s identity.
In asking questions, remember what your mother probably told you at least once a week, especially when you were a teenager: “Watch your tone of voice!” You can ask a question that’s been scripted for you by a lawyer for job interviews and still be justifiably accused of bias or other inappropriateness. For example, if you’re a man asking a beautiful female applicant, “How did you get along with your last boss?” you could find yourself in trouble if the inflection on “get along” suggests that you’re asking about more than a work relationship.
SIZE MATTERS
Another element of structure is the size of a question. To illustrate this idea, put your arms straight out in front of you, with your palms facing each other. Visualize a question fitting into that space. That’s the size of a good question. Now extend your arms to create an obtuse angle of about 160 degrees. Visualize a question fitting into that space. That’s the size of a question that’s probably bad.
What kind of bug is that?
What do you think that is…a biting bug or the kind that tastes good?
Short, simple questions tend to yield the clearest answers. The way to keep them short and simple is to follow the next rule: Ask about only one thing at a time.
Listen to interview shows with length in mind; you will be amazed at how journalists/interviewers sometimes take forever to set up a question. They want to slip in their point of view, to set the stage, to insert a few “relevant” bits of background information. Here is a question posed to the author of a human behavior book on a radio show about a State of the Union address by President Barack Obama: “Given that the colors red and blue are associated with the different parties, what are your insights on the fact that not only did the President wear a purple tie, but also Speaker of the House John Boehner—knowing as we do, of course, that purple is a combination of blue and red?” Even though the interviewer used an interrogative, the question was so stuffed with details that the end result was a bad question.
If you have a good question, you don’t have to do a lot of setup. Ask a good question and it will be understood that you understand the subject. You don’t have to embed expertise in qualifying phrases and ancillary remarks. With that guidance in mind, the interviewer could have phrased the question in a way that allowed the guest to express her expertise, rather than essentially throw an answer into the question: “What are your insights on the fact that both President Obama and House Speaker Boehner wore purple ties?”
USING FRAMES
In structuring a question, the best first step is the interrogative, but it may not be enough to get you started down a productive questioning path. Each question has single subject; sometimes it’s a complicated or emotionally taxing subject, though, so the question needs to be framed. Here’s an example.
Ann, an 80-year-old woman, walked slowly into the office of Matthew, a lawyer roughly her grandson’s age. Matthew could tell she seemed reticent, and, after offering her a comfortable chair and a cup of coffee, he sat down in a chair facing hers; there was no desk or table between them. “I’ll need to ask you a lot of questions, Ann,” he began. She said she understood. Instead of launching into a series of questions, however, Matthew wisely opened with, “Estate planning means different things to different people, so we need to focus first on who is important to you.” He waited a couple of seconds so she could digest that, and then he asked, “Who comes to mind for you when you think about estate planning?”
After Ann responded by talking about her two children, their spouses, and her two grandchildren, Matthew commented, “It sounds as though you have a loving, happy family, Ann. How do you think our work together will help them?”
Matthew used a technique I call framing throughout his questioning of Ann. This is a way of supplying information or comments that help the person answer your questions. Physicians do it when they open with, “I want to talk to you about your medical history,” as opposed to something akin to “What’s wrong with you today?” The framer sets the tone in addition to introducing the subject of the upcoming question.
Keep this technique in mind as you proceed through the next chapter and consider leading questions. Leading questions are bad questions that many people use instead of relying on framers. The difference is that framing a question does not suggest an answer to the question, whereas leading questions do.