Who, What, Where, and When, vs. How and Why
Separating Facts from Arguments
This is the fourth in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and links to the other articles in the series, click here.
The “Five Ws and an H” have been at the heart of teaching journalism for ages, and for good reason. For any event that happens, no matter what it may be, these categories of information form the core of what anyone needs to know about it. Who, what, where, when, why, and how cover a lot of ground.
Having the facts is not, however, necessarily the same thing as having an argument. An argument is a statement making a case for a particular stance on a particular topic. Nonfiction writers often need both fact and argument in order for their writing to do the work they want it to do.
Whether you need both or only facts is genre dependent: if you’re writing a recipe or a technical manual, you probably don’t need much in the way of argument, only facts. If you’re writing a political analysis or a self-help book or an essay or a piece of science writing, to give a non-exhaustive sampling, you’ll probably need both. There aren’t any genres of nonfiction writing where a writer needs only arguments and has no need for fact at all. (Even the most blatant propaganda still uses facts, even if they are often misrepresented for political effect.)
When nonfiction writers make arguments, they are sharing some kind of evaluative statement concerning facts and information, generally in the hope that their readers will agree with them or might be convinced to agree with them.
This doesn’t mean we should make an argument and then cherrypick facts and information to support it. Exactly the opposite.
Creating arguments derived from amassing information is the primary principle of inquiry. The only fair way to develop a stance about anything is to collect information and learn about it first. It’s also the only solid way to develop an argument: without facts as a foundation, arguments tend to crumble.
If we aren’t sure what’s fact and what’s interpretation, we run into trouble.
This can be particularly troublesome if we do most of our research by reading written sources. Written sources frequently include argumentation. It’s part of what they’re for.
Sometimes the argumentation in a written piece is explicit and the writer indicates clearly what is argument and what is evidence. Sometimes writers aren’t explicit and they don’t clearly identify where the facts stop and their interpretation begins.
It is not always or necessarily a bad thing (or a sign of any kind of underhandedness) if a writer doesn’t explicitly signpost an argument or come out and declare their interpretive agenda manifesto style. In some genres, like memoir, it’s simply taken as writ that the writer is speaking from their own very personal and idiosyncratic viewpoint. Op-eds and letters to the editor are also overtly argumentative by nature and since opinion is the whole point, arguments are unlikely to be signposted.
By contrast, journalism is supposed to center on the reportage of facts, with interpretations clearly identified. One of the reasons that the political endorsements of well-regarded newspapers have historically been so powerful is because readers, having learned to trust these papers to provide facts accurately and clearly, have also trusted them to evaluate and interpret those facts on matters like which candidate or which stance on an issue is best.
In academia, there is also a strong convention in many disciplines that argument should be clearly identified as distinct from evidence. This is because the discovery and presentation of evidence, in academia, is regarded as a distinct and separate task from interpreting it. Academics may greatly admire colleagues’ research while violently disagreeing with their interpretation of the data.
The choice to explicitly identify arguments can also be a stylistic choice: some writers like using a style in which rhetorical elements like arguments and evidence are clearly labeled. It can also be a question of audience: some audiences prefer it. Others don’t.
Both in our research and in our writing, we have to be aware of what we are doing as writers, whether we are stating a fact or making an argument.
To do this well, we also need to be aware of whether our sources are stating facts or making arguments.
One way to do this is by breaking down the “Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How” in ways that help us separate the facts from the arguments.
The Facts: Who, What, Where, When
“Five W’s and an H” is an easy rubric to remember. You may already have been taught it. But thinking through it a little more deeply can help you use this classic memnonic to better advantage.
Four of the Five W’s and an H are always facts: who, what, where, and when.
The Facts: Who
Most obviously, this covers the question of who acted. Who pulled the trigger? Who baked the cake? Who jumped the shark?
It is also a question of who (or who else) was there. Who saw them pull the trigger, bake the cake, or jump the shark?
It’s the question of additional participants in the action, as well. Many actions are directly involve other humans. If someone pulled the trigger, who got shot? If someone baked a cake, who ate it?
It’s also a question about the people who are involved collaterally in actions. If someone jumped the shark, who in the writer’s room was responsible for writing that into the script? If someone pulled the trigger, who provided that underaged shooter with access to firearms?
Sometimes collateral involvement is more immediate in space or time, other times it is less so. If someone baked a cake, whose recipe did they use? This may not seem relevant, but perhaps it’s a recipe handed down from a beloved family elder, or maybe the recipe was written by a person who stole the life savings of the person for whom the cake is being baked. A who doesn’t have to be direct or immediate to have relevance.
The thing all the whos have in common is that they are facts and factually provable. We can find out who did a thing, who saw them do it, who wrote a recipe, who paid the bill. Sometimes it can be complicated to find out who the actor was in a particular situation, or who was present for it, but it is at least a straightforward question. It can also be an interesting one: who is the big question behind every murder mystery. It’s why we call them “whodunnits.”
We can make arguments about why a person should or shouldn’t have been in a particular place or why they should or shouldn’t have done a particular thing. If we don’t know for sure who was present for an event, we can conjecture about who might’ve been, and that’s another kind of argument. But who is factual: we use this category when we can prove who was present.
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