Following up on my previous post, which I am reblogging below, I put the first two parts of my three-part “intellectual autobiography” into Clive Thompson’s “only the questions” online tool, and this is what I got back — click on each image to pull up a larger version:
The panel on the left side contains the questions from part 1 of my “intellectual autobiography” (IA), which covers the first ten years of my teaching career (1998 to 2008), while the right side contains the questions from part 2 of my IA, which recounts the years 2009 to 2019.
That is the name of this simple and elegant online tool (pictured below) created by Clive Thompson, a tech journalist, author, and developer of another similar web tool called “just the punctuation” that I blogged about last year (see here).
To the point, Thompson’s new “only the questions” tool allows you to delete all the regular declarative statements and exclamatory sentences from a text, leaving only those sentences or phrases consisting of questions. FYI, here is an extended excerpt from his essay “The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing” (ellipsis in the original):
When we’re writing, why do we ask questions? Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary signpost, a little trick for ushering the reader along: Great question, glad you asked, let me answer that one! Other times the questions are truly…
Editor in Northern California. Interested in tiny things, nineties nostalgia, old jungle mixtapes, punctuation, and my cats. Not to be fed after midnight.
prior probability 