Questions are a form of expressing our lack of knowledge, but when I bring someone else to help with my missing
pieces of knowledge that person is ignorant about me and what I’m trying to do. That’s why every question should
first start with and explanation of what we are trying to do.

E.g. I can ask a person where is the next pharmacy and he can send me two miles away, but if I ask “where can I buy
gum?” he can send me around the block to a convenience store…​

This is very applicable to technical questions e.g. developers often ask “how can I add a button anywhere in the screen”.

The answer is “it’s problematic and varies”.

A better question would start with “I am trying to place a button in the top right portion of the screen similar to this
image…​”.

Stackoveflow highlights this requirement and for good reason. It’s not just there to show that you did some work
before poping the question…​

This provides us insight into what doesn’t work so we don’t give an answer you already tried. It also provides insight
into the direction you are taking so if some things weren’t clear in your description this should seal the deal.

A good explanation would also include the source URL where you got that information as it might provide further
clues to why things didn’t work out.

I can’t stress enough how important a screenshot is for any question, I’d like to recommend JING
as it allows us to annotate screeshots very easily with text/arrows/boxes etc.

This makes a huge difference for visually oriented questions.

I get a lot of questions that complain about an error and don’t include the log from the IDE or include a cut version
of it…​ This is problematic.

With source the balance is more delicate, you should include source but this is a fine art. Include too much and
we will get lost when reading it. We will end up skimming the source and might miss an important nuance.
Include too little and we might not see the problem.

One thing I didn’t get to is the length of the question, that’s because this stops being a tip about question asking
and becomes a tip about good writing technique which is important but enters a whole new realm.

There are plenty of great books about writing and I wholly recommend them, good writing technique will impact
your work significantly. It will help you communicate with colleagues, customers and employers effectively. Despite
that it’s something that takes more work than these steps above all of which should be relatively trivial.