Deolian Domawa

The Art of Asking Questions

12 Sep 2024

“There are no stupid questions.”

Many of us have heard of this saying before by professors as a way to encourage class participation. However, only few do take it to heart as experience have proven to us that there are, indeed, stupid questions, be it hinted by the raise of an eyebrow, or a snicker from a classmate. In the end, the equivalency of this saying should be, “Don’t be afraid of asking questions.”

Gauge the situation

In a lecture setting, there aren’t many ways of avoiding stupid questions. It’s fast-paced, and time won’t stop for you to form the perfect question. Just make sure to think of the importance of the subject and if it needs to be addressed during class time, then ask away!

Now, asking questions outside of a classroom setting, on the other hand, is a different beast. There are many pitfalls to avoid, especially when they’re asked online.

Good answers follow good questions

As clearly explained by Raymond in How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, questions are free in the worldwide web, and so are answers. Unless it’s a paid website with monthly subscriptions for asking help, answers are provided by volunteers out of their kindness. As volunteers are humans with lives of their own, they’ll only answer questions that they find interesting, easy to answer, or would benefit many. When the question could be easily answered by a simple search in the web or by reading a manual, the answers would usually vary from being helpful, unhelpful, or downright sarcastic that are along the lines of RTFM and STFW.

When questions are asked the right way, people tend to be more cooperative and willing to help. Answers will be more precise and helpful with less time wasted by both parties.

Asking questions the smart way

To ask questions that would result in positive and helpful replies, one should do the following when they are applicable:

  1. Read the manual or search the web if your problem has already been addressed and solved
    • This shows that you have attempted to find the solution, and that it can’t be find by these simple methods.
  2. Use the right forum for your questions
    • You will get unhelpful and sarcastic comments if you ask in the wrong place.
  3. Use meaningful, specific subject headers
    • Broad headers often get ignored instinctively and make it harder to quickly grasp the issue, making it difficult for others with the same problem to find your post.
  4. Be precise and detailed while being grammatical, but keep in mind that volume is not precision
    • This makes it more tempting for people to reply as it’s easier and faster to provide you with helpful answers that requires less follow-ups.
  5. Describe the goal, and then the particular step that blocks your path
    • This helps others know if you were taking the right steps to your goal to being with.
  6. Describe the symptoms of the problem, not your guesses
    • Unless it is important information, it usually isn’t helpful and only increases volume.
  7. Don’t ask homework questions, but the concepts
    • People that know how to help you will usually find it distasteful when they find posts that are only asking others to solve their homework.
  8. Don’t grovel
    • This isn’t useful information, and distracts others away from the actual problem
  9. Be courteous
    • Showing your appreciation increases the chance of getting a useful answers.

Example of what to follow

A good example of what a smart way to ask a question in a forum such as stackexchange would be this post called Current in a circuit is 50% lower than predicted by Kirchhoff’s law where a math teacher needed help in finding the where the problem occurred when they were trying to validate their computations using a physical circuit, but were off by more than half of their supposed values.

Here, the title of the post has immediately given others know what the problem is, and have given them an idea of what look for as they’re reading. The post gave detailed list of the steps they had taken, the tools and software that were used, the values measured for every step, and a diagram of the circuit that was attempted.

The post received six answers, all of which had the same idea of where the error could have occurred. The highest-rated answer was well-written and comprehensive. It explained why the issue might have been related to the battery used, provided strategies to address this problem, identified gaps in the poster’s understanding, and directed them to additional resources that could help make similar experiments more accurate. With the amount of information given by the post, the people of the community were able to understand the question, and find where an error have occurred as they read through each step without asking an unnecessary amount of questions. Afterwards, the user ended the post responsibly by accepting the solution.

Example of what to avoid

An example of what to avoid would be this post titled Uart Dma using TMS570LS1224 Development Board where the poster asks for help with a code that configures a DMA controller to autonomously transfer an 8-bit character array from the internal memory to a UART transmitter register for higher data transfer efficiency.

In this case, the title was specific and it’s easy to understand what the subject would be about. However, the first information given when the post is visited is the question, “Can anyone help me with this task?” By creating a post, it was already a given that help was needed. In addition, the writing lacks proofreading, and it is clear that it was simply put together without a thought, giving potential helpers the impression that the user has not read the How to Ask manual, and it would take longer to find the right answer. This was further highlighted by the fact that no code was even provided, and the problem was not specified.

Consequently, a RTFM reply was given.

Conclusion

Asking questions is easy, but getting the right answer is harder because it depends on someone else’s time and effort. That’s why it’s very important to ask questions wisely, making it easier for volunteers to provide helpful answers that can also benefit others facing the same issue. Whether you’re learning a new hobby, debugging code, or fixing a wall, the art of asking questions is a crucial skill in our modern world.