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…
"I have enough time to rest, but I don't have a minute to waste". Come and catch me with your wise words and we will have some fun with our words of wisdom.