Writing a good answer on Stack Overflow

While this section is called “writing a good answer”, it is more appropriately described as “helping the asker of a question resolve the problem”. It’s important to understand that resolving a problem does not necessarily involve answering the question as originally written!

In the introduction to this site, we acknowledged that Stack Overflow gets questions that don’t fit the format of the site, and quite frankly, might be unanswerable at first. Fortunately, we feel that you, the members of the community, can help improve this situation with the right mindset and practices. We feel that nearly every “bad question” can be improved into a “good question” with your coaching, especially if you follow our suggestions for etiquette.