Asking Questions

In Our Towns, “Asking Questions” is the craft of sizing someone up — or drawing them out — through the kind of question you lead with. The Fallows contrast the default Washington/New York opener (“What do you do?” / “Where do you work?”), which “reflects the currency of the town” and leaves respondents “feeling boxed in and, often, judged,” against the gentler, open-ended alternative: “So, what’s your story?” Kyle flags this as a recurring theme, pairing the concept with Be Observant and Everyone Has a Story — the posture of inviting a person to take an answer in any direction rather than slotting them into a status hierarchy. It is framed in the book as one of the “traits of a town on the rise”: a more curious, less transactional way of meeting people.

Where this appears

• Our Towns — “so, what’s your story?” as a gentler way of sizing someone up, contrasted with the status-currency opener “what do you do?”; tagged by Kyle alongside Be Observant and Everyone Has a Story.

Saved from Roam

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