Helpfulness help: How to answer questions in a helpful way. - Help.com

I wrote:
Could you reply this post in a helpful way?

Mr. P wrote:
No.

I edited and wrote:
Could you reply this to post in a helpful way?

I edited and wrote:
Could you reply to this post in a helpful way?

I made my question smarter, hoping for more helpful answers.

drewvaness wrote:
I agree..

What do you agree with?

The Clue wrote:
Hope this helps :-)

It didn’t, really, but I do appreciate you taking your time to think about it and reply. Thanks.

I did like the comment about candyland because it was helpful to me in general, and similarly I appreciate my personal benefits from interacting with an intelligent mind, but it doesn’t give me much more clue about how to reply helpfully to people.

I appreciate your taking the time and effort to think and write about this.

I copied your advice from the other post because it was a response to this post.

lindaxfische wrote:
About answering questions in a helpful way. . .
I have been thinking about this and here is what I have so far:
- ensure you have a clear idea of what the questioner is asking,
- state the answer as clearly as possible
-don’t use any emotionally charged words
-don’t pretend you have an answer if you don’t, and/or say you don’t know but will try to find out if that is the case.
-ask the person to repeat what you have said if you are not sure of having been understood

chunkymove wrote:
I’d liek to have a a crack at answering your question properly later when I’m feelign better, so keep the post alive if you want

Funny, that’s exactly how I felt on your post — the interesting part of this article that I meant to point out were things way up above in the article, saying, “Don’t tell your theories of what has gone wrong to the people you’re asking for help from, just tell the symptoms, because if your theories about causes were correct you’d already know how to find the solution.”