Five Ws

The five Ws is a checklist used in journalism to ensure that the lead contains all the essential points of a story. As far back as 1913, reporters were taught that the lead should answer these questions:
In modern times, journalism students are still taught that these are the fundamental five questions of newswriting. Reporters also use the "5 Ws" to guide research and interviews and to raise important ethical questions, such as "How do you know that?".
There are many other names for this checklist. Some common ones are: The Five W's and H, The 5 W's of Journalism, Six Honest-Serving Men.
In the United Kingdom (excluding Scotland), the Five Ws are used in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 lessons (ages 7–14). In data analytics, the Five Ws are used in the first stage of the BADIR to identify the business problem and its context in an analytics request.
According to Inoslav Bešker, Professor of Philology at the University of Split in Croatia, the 5 Ws are rooted in the seven questions used in ancient Greece to communicate stories clearly:
Although long attributed to Hermagoras of Temnos, in 2010, it was established that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is in fact the source of the elements of circumstance or Septem Circumstantiae. Thomas Aquinas had much earlier acknowledged Aristotle as the originator of the elements of circumstances, providing a detailed commentary on Aristotle's system in his "Treatise on human acts" and specifically in part one of two Q7 "Of the Circumstances of Human Acts". Aquinas examines the concept of Aristotle's voluntary and involuntary action in his Summa Theologiae as well as a further set of questions about the elements of circumstance. Primarily, he asks "Whether a circumstance is an accident of a human act" (Article 1), "Whether Theologians should take note of the circumstances of human acts?" (Article 2), "Whether the circumstances are properly set forth (in Aristotle's) third book of Ethics" (Article 3) and "Whether the most important circumstances are 'Why' and 'In What the act consists'?" (Article 4).
For Aristotle, the elements are used to distinguish voluntary or involuntary action, a crucial distinction for him. These elements of circumstances are used by Aristotle as a framework to describe and evaluate moral action in terms of What was or should be done, Who did it, How it was done, Where it happened, and most importantly for what reason (Why), and so on for all the other elements:
For Aristotle, ignorance of any of these elements can imply involuntary action:
In the Politics, Aristotle illustrates why the elements are important in terms of human (moral) action:
Essentially, these elements of circumstances provide a theoretical framework that can be used to particularize, explain or predict any given set of circumstances of action. Hermagoras went so far as to claim that all hypotheses are derived from these seven circumstances:
In any particular act or situation, one needs to interrogate these questions in order to determine the actual circumstances of the action.
This aspect is encapsulated by Aristotle in Rhetoric as forensic speech and is used to determine "The characters and circumstances which lead men to commit wrong, or make them the victims of wrong" to accuse or defend. It is this application of the elements of circumstances that was emphasised by latter rhetoricians.
Even though the classical origin of these questions as situated in ethics had long been lost, they have been a standard way of formulating or analyzing rhetorical questions since antiquity. The rhetor Hermagoras of Temnos, as quoted in pseudo-Augustine's De Rhetorica, applied Aristotle's "elements of circumstances" (μόρια περιστάσεως) as the loci of an issue:
Aquinas also refers to the elements as used by Cicero in De Inventione (Chap. 24 DD1, 104) as:
Similarly, Quintilian discussed loci argumentorum, but did not put them in the form of questions.
Victorinus explained Cicero's application of the elements of circumstances by putting them into correspondence with Hermagoras questions 5 W's and an H :
Julius Victor also lists circumstances as questions.
Boethius "made the seven circumstances fundamental to the arts of prosecution and defense":
The question form was taken up again in the 12th century by Thierry of Chartres and John of Salisbury.
To administer suitable penance to sinners, the 21st canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) enjoined confessors to investigate both sins and the circumstances of the sins. The question form was popular for guiding confessors, and it appeared in several different forms:
The method of questions was also used for the systematic exegesis of a text.
In the 16th century, Thomas Wilson wrote in English verse:
In the United States in the 19th century, William Cleaver Wilkinson popularized the "Three Ws" – What? Why? What of it? – as a method of Bible study in the 1880s, although he did not claim originality. This eventually became the "Five W's", but the application was rather different from that in journalism:
The "Five W's" (and one H) were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories (1902), in which a poem, accompanying the tale of The Elephant's Child, opens with:
By 1917, the "Five Ws" were being taught in high-school journalism classes, and by 1940, the tendency of journalists to address all of the "Five Ws" within the lead paragraph of an article was being characterized as old-fashioned and fallacious:
Starting in the 2000s, the Five Ws were sometimes misattributed to Rudyard Kipling (referred to as "The Kipling Method"), especially in the management and quality literature, and contrasted with the five whys.
In English, most of the interrogative words begin with the same letters, wh-; in Latin, most also begin with the same letters, qu-. This is not a coincidence, as they are cognates derived from the Proto-Indo-European interrogative pronoun root ko-, reflected in Proto-Germanic as χa- or kha- and in Latin as qu-.