Asking Questions Like A Pro
30 Jan 2020Over Come Your Fear Of Learning
Asking for help can be a daunting task for people who are insecure about appearing unintelligent. This is what hinders people from really learning, if you have to have a battle with you ego every time you get stuck on a problem, learning would be a terrible experience for you. If you are one of those people, learning does not have to be miserable and self deprecating. There is a way you can ask questions without seeming dumb, lazy, and desperate.
Classy Questions
From the essay by Eric Raymond, a “smart question” is described as a question that demonstrates some previous work on the subject matter at hand. A smart question tells the reader every possible attempts at solving the problem the asker has made. problem solving can be like navigating a maze, there are many paths you can take, and some could lead to a deadend. If you were to ask someone to help you navigate through your problem, its usually more efficient to inform the reader of all possible solutions you have tried and what you have learned from those attempts.
This is a example of a smart question from StackExchange.
The person asking the question, Mark clearly states the error they were getting and what they did to solve the error. This shows that mark
really did some research and thinking on this. Mark also stated what he hoped to find on google but couldn’t which stated
what he wanted to know. This question is well worded and to the point, which resulted in a lot of responses.
A lot of people also found this question helpful so it got a lot of views which allowed a large amount of people to vote
for the best answer out of 27. This is good for everyone because now if someone has the same question they can find this forum,
skip all the bad answers and go straight to the one voted by many to be helpful.
Questions without class or style
Whoever that said “there are no bad questions” is a liar. Outside of awkward situtations where people desperatley need someone to ask a question, like high school health class, there are bad questions. A bad question is one where it is vague, doesnt demonstrate prior work done, doesn’t provide the reader with any headway in reaching a solution. The bad questions are what you would call a lazy question. Below is a lazy question found on Sack Exchange
This question doesn’t demonstrate any prior research, or demonstrate any attempts at solving their problem. They didn’t even say they’ve looked on youtube, a lot of times a question like this can be solved by watching a video on youtube or simply by googling it. A question like this pollutes the web with noise on a subject like this. I like to call this a waste of space because now we have duplicate information floating around on the internet. This contributes to a problem that I see, information pollution. This is the the result of people putting garbage on the internet.