A friendly guide on how to ask for help
I came across Ava's post on how to properly ask for help and I found the post to be quite aggressive. I am a learner myself and I used to "bark words" instead of asking good questions. Most of the time it's not that I am a bad question asker, but rather no one ever points that out to me, and I have not yet honed my skills in asking good questions.
I am a peer teacher (or a teaching assistant in more familiar words) for an engineering lab, and I encounter students like this all the time. They stumble across problems that can be solved by simply reading my manual, which is in front of them. I get frustrated, then I become mean and annoyed. However, I was once in their place, and not trying to ask good question will not have me here at where I am.
Learning to ask good questions is one of the first steps to learning effectively. I don't learn well when people are aggressive to me. So if you happen to be like me, here is a friendly guide to how to ask good questions. This is a generalized guide from the more coding/web development guide on Odin's Project Asking For Help.This blog should also add the XY problem. And thank you, Ava, for the blog idea!
Always try to solve it yourselves first
There is very little chance that no one has ever encountered your problem, because there are more than 8 billion humans on Earth and odds are good that someone has asked and got an answer before. So, go search the internet, look into forums, FAQs, and blog posts. People love to vent and share what they did. I also did a similar thing 2 days ago on how I got my blog unbanned from my university network. You may not find the exact solution to your problem. I usually find very similar problems, where I need to make little twists here and there. Fortunately, we now have AI.
You can also ask LLMs on how to solve them. Those are more likely to give you more tailored solutions, because they also look into other sources, other than similar problems. Be aware of their hallucinations tho, they can sound so confident yet what they are giving you is totally BS. Always double-check!
Another good way that "experts" would do is to read the manual or read the documentation. I am impatient, and I'm pretty rookie in most of my fields, so most of my problems have been encountered by other people, so it would be faster to look it up on the internet. Once you have passed that "holding hand honeymoon" phase, documentation and books will be your best friend, but this blog is not for that.
Provide as much context as possible
Your printer is not printing. You have tried to look into the ink level, your connection is fine, the file was sent to the printer, and there was no paper jam. You ring IT: "Hello IT, I sent my files for printing to the printer on the 2nd floor, for printing, and it did not print. I have checked that the ink level is ok, there was no paper jam, paper is filled, and the file was sent. It is model XYZ 321. Can you take a look?" That is what I would say when a printer is not printing. I am not an expert in printers.
If your question is too vague, your question is too hard to answer because the person answering may not know where to start, so it takes more time and energy to narrow down what your problem actually is. Some other times, that person is an expert, and they will actually give you an answer, but it can also be so vague and general, just like your question. So, good question in, great answer out.
How can I fry an egg? First, learn smithing and make your own pan!
More specifically, if you are coding, you can provide the exact error message or the line of code your console points to. You may not be the expert in giving as much information, but at least try, and it will save everyone involved time.
Be patient and willing to provide more detail
This happens a lot more online than actually in person, because you won't really physically doze off after asking a question. That would be concerning if that happens. For online questions, stay online and always be willing to provide more details. It is disappointing to be eager to answer a question, waiting for more details, and the person asking it is not there.
Keep in mind that help can come in more forms than an answer. You can go away with a direction on how you might want to do it, and figure it out yourself. Be open to what kind of help you actually get.
Ask about the problem at hand, not a solution, or an alternative that you think of (the XY problem).
Another thing to consider is that if you are asking to learn or asking for a solution. If you know that you don't really want to be a printer expert and you need your papers printed fast, you want to ask for an answer. Other times you want to learn something, face the uncomfort and ask to learn and avoid hand-holding. You may struggle, but you will actually get more out of it.
Another pitfall that people usually fall into is the XY problem. I feel like it is a bit more techy when this happens, but I think it is useful to know nonetheless.