Communication is always a critical issue for me since I feel uncomfortable about talking to strangers. Therefore, I usually didn’t ask questions because I didn’t want people to ask me questions. However, asking questions via typing messages is one way that I could feel stressless due to I can modify the questions before sending or passing. Fortunately, I read an essay written by Eric Raymond called How to ask questions the smart way recently, and I felt this essay is very helpful for me to pay more attention on question asking. I believe that people sometimes accidently ask inappropriate questions which could lead to bad consequences happen, such as time wasting and no progress. Therefore, learning how to ask “smart” questions is the way to acquire effectiveness.
There are some interesting tips I found in the essay, including using meaningful subject headers and making it easy to reply. The reason of I feel interesting is not because they providing or teaching new ideas to me, but because I have already recognized these tips and tried to implement them; however, I still made mistakes while asking questions. The author organized the common mistakes that are easily overlooked by people, so I feel greatful of reviewing them clearly and carefully. Besides, the essay also mentioned several actions that we need to do even before we start to asking. For instances, trying to find answer by searching the web and reading the manual. These actions could eventually prevent us from asking, but we still can solve our questions by ourselves. Besides, saving the time of everyone who could potentially answer our “stupid” questions. The last thing I want to mention is attitude. The essay mentioned that descrbing what you try in order to solve the problems which is linked to showing the attitude that we really want to solve and prove that we did try our best. I believe the actions could encourage other more willing to help.
In the essay, posting homework questions is one of things we should avoid. It is the “stupid” question that I found in the stackoverflow website. The question basically copy/paste the assignment or interview questions and ask for help. The comments showed that people don’t seems to willing to help. One of them even asked “where is the question?”. There is the other question which I consider a “smart question” that I found in the stackoverflow website. This question is clear enough, and it showed the attitude of the questioner. Because the questioner provided the code that s/he came out to be his/her only way to solve the problem, the other people could provide different way to achieve the same outcome.