What Makes a Question Smart?

10 Sep 2025

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Why should you ask questions?

As someone who has spent hours working on a singular assignment, project, or even personal goal just to be completely stuck on a simple tasks. Maybe the understanding isn’t there, I read the requirements wrong, or I just didn’t grasp the concept as well as I assumed. That feeling of failure beats me up more than anything in this world, which is why I also believe it’s more than important for a person to speak up and ask questions. No one on Earth is equipped with an all knowing brain nor a flawless intellect, thus why humans are curious and question everything. Questions are important because they save time, reduce confusion, and allow for better understanding through the perspective of another eye.

What makes a question smart?

I believe a smart question always starts with intention, progress, and then inquiry. Take for an example this question on stack overflow, the user provided an intention “I would like to store a mapping of string”, provides progress with his example code, and inquiries about the specific problem “Is there a way for me to enforce the values that must be strings”. In most cases when it comes to asking questions, your peers and superiors are always looking for effort. Blindly relying on someone else before attempting yourself shows a lazy and unmotivated attitude. Which is why smart questions would always include what was first attempted, giving the respondant something to work with rather than a blank slate.

Conclusion

Prior to asking a question on a certain topic, you must be considerate of the people responding to you. You must know your intention with the question(what you are trying to solve), your progress on the problem(ie. your code snippet, error returned by the console), as well as the inquiry(specific action to be settled). Thus not only would you know the direction of your inquiries, but so will others and allow for better communication and less confusion