Thinking in Smart questions
25 Jan 2024
What Are Smart Questions?
In the realm of learning and personal growth, asking questions plays a pivotal role. Not only does it demonstrate active engagement with a particular subject, but it also fosters critical thinking and the ability to analyze information effectively. Nevertheless, in a professional context or in general, posing questions to respected peers necessitates the skill of formulating intelligent inquiries. Doing so is crucial to avoid the perception of laziness, arrogance, or incompetence. By crafting thoughtful questions, individuals convey a genuine desire to understand and contribute to the discourse, fostering a positive and collaborative environment. This approach not only enriches one’s own knowledge but also promotes a culture of constructive communication and shared learning.
Examples of Smart and not Smart Questions
A helpful community to ask questions for programming related questions is on Stack Overflow. According to Eric Raymond, in his article How to Ask Questions the Smart Way. Absolutely, thorough research is a fundamental step before posing questions. It involves searching online, examining provided or available sources, and exploring forums to determine if similar questions have been addressed. This proactive approach not only showcases one’s commitment to finding answers independently but also helps in avoiding redundancy. Furthermore, the art of formulating critical questions is crucial. Articulating inquiries with a clear problem-solving attempt, along with providing specific details and background information, enhances the chances of receiving insightful and targeted responses. Equally important is maintaining a respectful and polite demeanor, especially when seeking assistance. Acknowledging and appreciating the time and effort others invest in addressing queries fosters a positive and collaborative atmosphere conducive to meaningful exchanges of information. Smart question in Stack Overflow that demonstrate.
Smart Question
An example of a smart question I found on Stack Overflow was posted around March 22nd, 2017. It was asking what the most efficient way to clone a JavaScript object. What I believe makes it a smart question is their specific attempts on solving the problem as well as their results or what their thought process was. An example that demonstrates that is when they said
“I’ve seen obj = eval(uneval(o)); being used, but that’s non-standard and only supported by Firefox”.
It shows they did further research as well as the specific reasoning that one of the possible solutions was not viable.
Smart Question : example
Not Smart Question
An example of a not so smart question I found was posted quite recently on September 5th, 2023. It was asking how to remove a green wavy underline in Visual Studio. Although their question sort of shows they did some research on how, they lack clarity on what suggestions they already tried. Another thing I’ve noticed about is that they had a somewhat demanding tone as well as various informal language and grammatical errors. The part that explicitly show their negative tone and grammatical errors the most is the last sentence that says
” So i hope someone have a solution”.
The “i” isn’t capitalized, “have” should’ve been replaced with has, and again they have a demanding and impatient tone.
Not Smart Question : example