The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing

I made a web tool that lets you do that.

Clive Thompson
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readFeb 27, 2022

--

An image beginning with this text: “What do you see? How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? What is the chief element he employs? Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies — what is the one charm wanting? Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?”
All the sentences in the first chapter of Moby Dick that pose a question

(tl;dr — if you want to try out my web tool for seeing only the questions in a piece of writing, it’s online here!)

When we’re writing, why do we ask questions?

Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary…

--

--

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net