Questions_Insights_Connections

When you finish a class’s readings you should be able to note a question, an insight, and a connection (a QIC). They are a consequence of active +Reading but quicker than a +Writing Responses.

Keep each part to one to two sentences, anchored in a specific concept, example, or quotation. In class, you should be able to share and discuss each.

Question

A good question is:

• genuine: you actually want to know, and it isn’t a rhetorical flourish or a leading question with your opinion smuggled inside;
• anchored: it names the claim, passage, or example that provoked it;
• higher-order: it asks how, why, under what conditions, or compared to what, rather than who or when (see higher-order questions);
• tractable: you can sketch what an answer would look like, or what evidence would settle it—even if the answer is that there isn’t one.

Weak questions come in predictable flavors. The lookup: “What is the Haber-Bosch process?” (Go find out.) The vague gesture: “How does this affect society?” The unanswerable sprawl: “How do we solve misinformation?” The disguised summary: “Why does the author think corn is subsidized?”

A useful move is to take your first, weak question and force it to name a specific tension in the text:

Weak: What does Pollan think about farm subsidies?

Better: Pollan praises New Deal loans and the “ever-normal granary” (p. 49) but attacks Nixon-era subsidies, yet farmers are paid for surplus under both. Is the difference the mechanism, or just who captures the benefit?

Insight

An insight is a novel claim of your own that the text made possible but did not itself make. The test: could anyone who did the reading have written this sentence?

Some reliable ways to have one:

• name a pattern the author leaves implicit;
• surface an assumption the argument depends on;
• identify a tension between two of the author’s own claims;
• offer a counter-example, or a “screw-example” that sits on the boundary of a concept (see +Making Sense of Concepts);
• apply the concept somewhere the author didn’t and report what happens—especially where it breaks;
• specify a scope condition: “this holds when X, but presumably not when Y.”

Weak insights are reactions wearing a hat: “I found it interesting that corn is in everything”; “this shows how important food policy is”; “the author makes a good point.” Interest, importance, and goodness are conclusions; the insight is the argument that earns them. Say the thing itself, in a sentence someone could disagree with.

Connection

Connections run from weak to the strong.

• Resemblance: “this reminds me of TikTok.” (How?)
• Illustration: an outside case that exemplifies the author’s concept.
• Extension: a concept from an earlier reading or discussion that explains, sharpens, or reframes this one.
• Contradiction: two sources that cannot both be right, plus what evidence would settle it.