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Writing good questions can be difficult. To help you, the community came up with ten yes or no questions that will guide you and help you prevent common errors.

Follow the links for more information and examples for each question.

Positive questions (You should answer these with yes):

  1. Does the question title accurately and concisely summarize the specific question that you are asking?

  2. Have you done research on your topic and included everything that is important for your question?

  3. Is the technological level of your world clear or has no influence?

  4. Have you thoroughly explained your setting and the question's premises?

  5. Is the question scan-able?

  6. Are you limiting your question to a single, narrow facet of your world to keep it from being too broad?

Negative questions (You should answer these with no):

  1. Do you ask how your character would act in a given situation?

  2. Are you asking about a large number of impacts resulting from your original situation?

  3. Do answers to your question depend on any knowledge specific to your setting that isn't included in the question, like how your magic system works?

  4. Does it take longer than 5 minutes to read your question?

Further information:

If you can answer these questions as described, you have the best chance that your question will be understood, be on-topic and be well received. If you want to improve your post even more, here are some more resources that might help you:

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    $\begingroup$ 4 & 9 need special love. Otherwise-interesting-questions keep coming up that miss those points and slip into 'answerable only with major assumptions' territory. Of course, I suspect the problem is often unstated assumptions due to unnoticed assumptions on the part of the questioner. $\endgroup$
    – The Nate
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 9:33
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @TheNate You have a point. You might want to upvote the original suggestions of these questions in this post to give them more visibility (none of those are mine, so I am not doing some self-advertising;)) $\endgroup$
    – T3 H40
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 9:46
  • $\begingroup$ the "perfect" question, really? $\endgroup$
    – TylerH
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:27
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    $\begingroup$ @TylerH At least it's a lot more readable than Guiding questions that help you prevent common errors when writing a question or guide you on where to look for first if there are problems with a question you wrote $\endgroup$
    – T3 H40
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:34
  • $\begingroup$ @T3H40 Sure, if you want to spin your wheels, but maybe "great" or "good" instead of "perfect" would be a bit more believable. $\endgroup$
    – TylerH
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:38
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    $\begingroup$ @TylerH Sure. Though this post is mainly targeted to an audience that (seemingly) did not visit the locations at the end of the post, it would be unnecessary if everyone had. So in order to get the attention of these people, you have to create interest :) As mentioned here the exaggeration is intentional. $\endgroup$
    – T3 H40
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:49
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Relevant examples of how we tackled this at Code Review here and here. Feel free to be inspired. $\endgroup$
    – Mast
    Commented Jun 20, 2016 at 8:33

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