From The Graham English Wiki
- Questions recover information, clarify meaning and add choices.
- Questions provoke a "transderivational search": when you look through your ideas, memories and experience to search for something that will enable you to make sense of the question.
- Questions can be asked from different perceptual positions. They can be internal, external, direct, manipulative, and contain assumptions.
- Questions may be open or closed. Closed questions require only a "yes" or a "no" answer. Open questions begin with what, who, why, when, where and how.
- What?
seeks information
elicits outcomes
- Who?
seeks information about people
- Why?
seeks justifications and reasons for actions
seeks values
allocates blame
searches for meaning
looks for past causes
- When?
orients in time
seeks time-bound information (past, present, or future)
asks for triggers and cues for action
- Where?
asks for information about places
- How?
explores process
models the process
elicits strategies
asks for quality and quantity (How many? How much?)
- What can questions do?
- elicit states
- get information
- give choices or take them away, depending on the presuppositions
- direct attention and so create reality
- cause a transderivational search
- model strategies
- elicit resources
- challenge assumptions
- orient in time by asking about past, present, or future
- elicit outcomes
- associate or dissociate
- give strategies
- build (or break) rapport
- summarize
- elicit values
- Questions about questions
- What is the most useful question I can ask right now?
- What don't I know that would make a difference if I did?
- What question can I ask that will best help my companion?
- What question would get me closest to my outcome?
- Do I need to ask a question at all?
