Posing a Question to an Expert

When you've hit the limit of your knowledge while solving a problem nothing helps quite so much as being able to ask an expert for suggestions. Getting a useful answer, however, requires that the the expert understand the context of your question. Indeed, what defines an expert is the ability to exploit context information to find solutions that would not otherwise be obvious. Thus, the task of asking an expert for help boils down to providing aequate context and a clear goal. To achieve this your question should contain the following elements.

  1. Structural: Explain what it is that you are working on and what you are trying to accomplish.
  2. Explanatory Example: Give an example thad both demonstrates the task you're doing and the problem you've encountered.
  3. Pros: Describe the appraoch would you like to try and why it should be effective.
  4. Cons: Describe the process or problem is holding you back.
  5. Action Request: State what you want to learn from the expert.

Getting this problem descritpion right the first time is even more critical when questioning an expert via e-mail as it is very difficult and time consuming for the expert to extract this information from you piecemeal via a series of messages.

 

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This page was last updated by George Young on August 8, 2011