Communication is a life skill that all of us utilize throughout the day. One of the major parts of communication is being able to formulate your own questions. The well-known saying, “There are no wrong/bad questions”, turns out to be wrong. An individual who asks questions in class is someone who is engaged, and has a desire to learn. However, being able to develop and formulate a good question takes practice. Good questions involve critical thinking and have relevance to the topic at hand. Bad questions range from simply to no attempt at the problem, to just asking questions that only seek confirmation.
In Eric Raymond’s, How to ask questions the smart way, he provides details for strong interplay with the community. This essay is divided up into numerous sections and subsections, to better touch upon each subject for ultimately developing a good question.
” it is necessary to demonstrate the kind of attitude that leads to competence — alert, thoughtful, observant, willing to be an active partner in developing a solution.”
This question here, Navbar not fitting the whole page ,checks off all the marks of what categorizes this as a good question. The individual wrote out their question in a thoughtful, clear, and concise style. We can also see that this indivdual took their time, and made sure that their question is relevant to the topic. They followed the basic rules that Raymond discussed for what you do before asking, what you do when you ask, and they as well provided their work and ended with a courteous remark. All while making sure that this question hasn’t been asked previously.
“If you decide to come to us for help, you don’t want to be one of the losers. You don’t want to seem like one, either. The best way to get a rapid and responsive answer is to ask it like a person with smarts, confidence, and clues who just happens to need help on one particular problem.”
Unfortunately, some individuals don’t further themselves when they ask questions, like this one here, Initialize form with a string as input parameter duplicate. As we can see from this question, this individual took no time whatsoever constructing their question. From Eric Raymond’s details of developing a good question, this user did not follow the first few basic rules of what you do before you ask. Rules such as seeking only agreement, and as well as not being an unique question since it has been marked as duplicate.