I feel I really need to emphasize that it is important to
try to express yourself as clearly as possible; how well you
succeed in that is not very important at all.
The reason is twofold.
One is that the attempt itself will organize your thoughts on the matter; see my earlier mention about
rubber duck debugging to find out exactly why. That is, just by making the effort of expressing yourself to others clearly, you end up organizing your thoughts. So, it is worth the effort to the asker to do this, even if they get zero responses.
The other is that the effort does show up. I personally have to re-read my own posts afterwards to make sure I expressed what I intended, and often end up having to modify the post for grammar and individual words. (Be careful to not change the
meaning of the post, especially after someone has responded, because the history of the discussion is itself important and useful. Adding a note, or using overstrike, to show that some part is wrong/incorrect/needs clarification, is perfectly okay.)
So, even if you have trouble expressing yourself, just take your time and spend the effort you wish others would spend when responding to you (or if you prefer helping others, the effort you wish others would spend when asking questions). If anyone has difficulties understanding the question or answer, they should ask for clarification; perhaps via
"do you mean you have ...." explaining how they understood it, to make it easier to clarify. (A post stating "I don't understand you." is not very useful, because the not-understood person has no idea how to adjust their output to make it more understandable.)
Some of the posts above related to phonetics (the "standard" is
international phonetic alphabet, or IPA, although various languages have their own; for example Chinese
Pinyin) show how complicated it is to express a spoken English word in writing.
Consider, therefore, how complicated it can be to express a technical idea or problem, exactly!
Even if you have it crystal clearly in your mind, conveying it to others is not so simple. It takes effort.
For arithmetic, algebra, calculus, and formal logic we have mathematical notation; MathJax seems widely used on the web as of 2024, and works here too. (See e.g.
this thread.) For programming, we have a number of programming languages and even "pseudocode", not implementing any specific programming language but being similar to many. For electronics circuits, we have schematic diagrams with more or less standard set of
electronic symbols.
It is quite common that the actual "showstopper" to understanding or solving some problem is not where the asker believes it to be, but one or more steps "deeper" into the question. In mathematics, we typically avoid that by examining entire equations, possibly generalized by replacing and combining numerical constants with named constants. In programming, where the entire source is often too large to show, one is expected to distill the problem into a
minimal, complete, verifiable example (MCVE), that is short enough to convey, but still exhibits the same problem. Similarly, when the problem concerns an electrical circuit, it is important to include everything relevant to the problem, while omitting the unrelated details.
Obviously, it takes time and effort to learn to do any of those well. My own point here is that as long as you put in and show the
effort –– including a followup post when you decide on your solution path, and recording your conclusions for others reading the thread later on ––, and are willing to learn, it suffices. But, at the same time, the effort is
necessary, as otherwise the signal-to-noise ratio of discussion can drop to the level of shouting in a crowded mall, which is no fun at all when technical discussions are involved.
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