Asking Smart Question

30 Jan 2020

Having questions and being confused are very common situations in the processes of learning new skills or knowledge. Asking helps from other people is an efficient way, but that’s should be the prior way for solving problems. We have deep understanding about questions we solve by ourselves because we understand every piece in the solutions. One question might have many different ways to think and solve, even a same solution might have different ways to understand it. Therefore, the process of learning means that we need to find out the proper way to think and analysis questions rather than just pursuing an answer.

Being smart to ask question is important because it can boost the chance that we get help from other people. If we still cannot find out any idea about the question after we tried all the ways we can do including reading the principle from book and searching relevant resource from internet, we should prepare our smart questions for asking helps. A smart question must be clear and concise that people are able to understand what we are seeking in a short time. We need to show how we work and understand so far about the question, so people can easily see where we are stuck because sometimes our questions relate different modules of knowledge and we just miss one or two of them.

That’s a good example about asking smart question, link of the code: smart question. In this question, it has necessary relevant resources in the head, and it shows the important part of code and its output. In the end, the asker put forward his assumption and question. That’s the correct way to ask question. Therefore, this question got many votes and responds. However, if a person asked a stupid question, many readers will just ignore it because they do not want to waste their time for an unclear or simple question. For example, there is a bad example, bad question. We need to show how we work so far, but we should not upload the whole program. The asker just put everything on it and seek people to correct his errors. That’s a way of low learning efficiency and waste reader a lot of time to go through the question. Therefore, this question got negative votes and few responds.