How to get useful answers to your questions - Julia Evans

This resource first appeared in issue #98 on 29 Oct 2021 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools

How to get useful answers to your questions - Julia Evans

Evans gives advice for how to get useful answers to questions - the context she uses is technical questions, but honestly the approach works just as well for getting your boss or collaborators to answer questions in email, or anything else.

She offers two pieces of advice for making it easier for the question-answerer to give you the answer:

  • Ask yes/no questions
  • State your current understanding

And two pieces of advice for getting more out of the answer:

  • Be willing to interriupt
  • Don’t accept responses that don’t answer your question
  • Take a minute to think
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