As a recommended requisite to my seminary journey, I’m reading The Craft of Research (Booth et al. 2016). Chapter three introduced the three-step process of turning “a question into a problem” (49) when asked to make the fruit of your curiosity enticing to others.
Learning for its own sake is edifying in and of itself. When we begin with a fear of the Lord (Ps 1:7), we lay the foundation for true understanding and unassailable wisdom. This in turn enriches our souls, even if we never share the knowledge we’ve acquired.
However, anything worth knowing is worth sharing. This leads to the question: how do we present the knowledge in an engaging way? The authors believe that rephrasing into a problem the question that sparked your curiosity is the best way to engage an audience.
- Topic: I am studying ________
- Question: because I want to find out what / why / how ________
- Significance: in order to help my reader understand ________.
This takes a creative mind, but anyone curious enough to learn can do this. Simply reverse-engineer a conceptual context — Jeopardy! contestants do this on each episode when they’re given an answer from which they must extrapolate a question. The authors use the example of contextualizing a menu from an historic, dirigible balloon to prove that open-flame cooking was allowed on such airships. (I can not attest to the veracity of their example, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Whatever you happen to research, ask yourself why? Why do you want to learn about it? Then, ask how the knowledge will help someone. Some people will simply enjoy hearing about what you’ve learned; but to maximize the information’s appeal, imagine a problem, no matter how inconsequential, that the knowing will resolve.
- Booth, Wayne C, Gregory G Colomb, Joseph M Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T Fitzgerald. The Craft of Research. Fourth. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016.