<p><strong>This is intended to be a &quot;humorous and friendly thread on how to ask a horrible question&quot; (<em>amoeba</em>) which can help new users understand how to write good questions.</strong></p>
<p>We hope you will contribute one &quot;suggestion&quot; per reply.  Include (if you wish) its rank in the top ten reasons to close questions.  But please add some explanation of why your suggestion is bad and (also if you wish) how to improve such questions.</p>
<p>One possible use of the replies in this thread will be targets of links provided in comments to closed questions.</p>
<hr />
<h3>Example</h3>
<blockquote>
<ol start="10">
<li>The title is &quot;Statistics question.&quot;</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>On a statistics site, this is meaningless.  Good titles attract good readers.  Make yours count.  Use key words that clearly indicate what your question is about and how it might differ from similar ones.</p>
<p>(Often such titles reflect carelessness and lack of thought: they tend to be accompanied by questions elsewhere on our Top Ten list, such as copy-pasted homework.  Such posts will usually be closed within minutes without further explanation.)</p>
<hr />
<h3>References</h3>
<p>See our &quot;TenFold&quot; chat thread beginning at <a href="http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30673850#30673850">http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/30673850#30673850</a> for the first incarnation of this list.  Thanks to <em>Amoeba, Scortchi, <s>user777</s>, er, <s>GeneralAbrial</s>, um, Sycorax <span class="math-container">$\checkmark$</span>, NickCox, Silverfish, Glen_b, usεr11852, Matthew,</em> (and any others I may have overlooked) for your suggestions.  Feel free to borrow from and expand on those ideas.</p>
