Asking Good Questions

When you ask a question, most likely, your goal is to get an answer that is both relevant and helpful. The question here is, how do you ask questions that will get you answers at all, and most importantly, answers that you want? For that, you need to make sure that you are asking good questions. What makes a question a good question? Deepening on who you ask, and where you’re asking, there could be a umber of important points. Let’s just touch on a couple.

Get the attention of potential answerers. If you’re posting your question somewhere on the internet, think of it like sending an e-mail. You have you title, much like the subject line, in which you have your chance to get your main point across. You might also have the first few lines of the message body as well. Make good use of these spaces! Include all relevant information as best you can. You need to ensure that someone who might be looking at dozens of these every couple of minutes sees yours and is both intrigued by it and wants to answer it if they are able to. Overly generic titles and early lines wasted on greetings or apologies for asking aren’t likely to get much positive attention.

Give examples! If your question is code related, include the bits of code where you are having trouble. Careful here as you only want to include as much as necessary, not overload potential answer holders with hundreds of lines of needless code. Also make sure to include any error messages that you might be getting. Don’t shy away from detail here. What might look like a bunch of nonsense to you might help someone quickly answer your question. If you were expecting one thing to happen, or specific output, include both what you were expecting and what you ended up getting or what ended up happening. This can help others narrow down possible answers.

Spelling and grammar! Yes, this is the internet. m@ny WaYz 2 wryte 7h3r3 r. Just don’t. Stick the most widely accepted spellings and rules of grammar. It will make your question both easier and more pleasing to read. The less time someone needs to spend deciphering your question, the more time they will have to dedicate to find and providing your answer. Also somewhat related to this, be polite. Simple common courtesy can go a long way. You are asking for help after all.

There are a number of other useful tips, but following at least these few should start you in the right direction. I found this resource, and it’s contained links, to be quite helpful. Now it’s time for me to practice my good question asking for the upcoming weeks!