When I started the blog, I made a promise to myself that I was going to avoid becoming one of those bloggers who spent all day simply posting links to other sites and blogs. However, sometimes it’s just plain necessary.
First off, I’d like everyone to read How To Ask Questions the Smart Way. Yes, it’s kind of long, but please, take a few minutes and read it. As many of you know, I spend a lot of my time moderating and responding to posts on several Yahoo groups, and not a day goes by that someone doesn’t violate a few of the simple guidelines presented on that page. Routinely, people post questions that are way off topic, or have bad and/or meaningless subject lines, or are so non-specific or so poorly worded that they are meaningless.
I should note that I’m not posting this because somehow I think it will make things easier for me. The vast majority of the time, if a question is really badly written or way off topic, I’ll simply ignore it. So really, having people read the article and start asking better questions would most likely end up in more work for me, not less. But the point here isn’t me. The point is that if you learn to ask better questions, you’re much more likely to get better answers more quickly.
Second, one of the blogs I read daily is Scott Kelby’s. Kelby runs the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and is the best-selling computer book author out there. In fact, I will, without reservation, recommend any book he’s written.
Several months ago, he had a great post on how to be a good student. This is very similar to the “good question” thing above, and again, I post it for the same reason. Obviously, having good students is something near and dear to my heart, and I wish I could hand out a print-out of this article and make everyone read it before class each day, but in lieu of that, I’ll just post it here and hope everyone reads it…
