Provide Context --------------- **Context matters**. A question can sometimes be answered in one sentence when the discussion is between two experts familiar with each other's background, while the same question may take many paragraphs of detailed computation when being shown to an undergraduate student. By providing a context you help the potential responders to your question give you the best help you need. **Some different ways you can add context to your question** - **Include your work** You have a question, and if you post it here, you've probably attempted, and failed, to solve it yourself. It is much easier for others to judge the most appropriate "level" for an answer to your question if you provide these attempts. So you'll receive answers better suited to your specific needs. Including your work also shows to the community that you're not using this website as an answer machine -- as such, your question will be received more positively. A further benefit of writing down precisely what you've tried is that, in the process of doing so, you're not unlikely to spot that crucial error and solving your problem yourself. Bonus! - **You can provide some _motivation_ to your question.** Instead of just asking us to find the roots of an equation, tell us where the equation comes from. This is especially the case when your equation comes from models of the physical worlds: those kinds of intuition are great guiding principles for formulating an answer. - **You can tell us where the question comes from.** If your question comes from studying a textbook, let us know which book. This way the answers can be phrased in a manner and in a notation more familiar to you. - **Give full references.** If you run across a question when reading a scientific paper, be sure to link to that paper using its [doi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier) link, or provide a proper bibliographic information. A question that reads "A theorem of Smith says that Widget X is a type of Gadget Y, but I don't see why Property Z must hold" is likely not going to be very comprehensible to other users without telling us which Smith said what when and where. - **Give definitions.** Something that you are familiar with may not be so to another user. One should of course use one's best judgment in deciding what objects are sufficiently well-known to not need defining. But when in doubt, either provide the definition or provide a link to a resource that gives the definitions. Another case where this can be useful is when the same mathematical object can be defined in many ways, and the answer to your question may depend on the precise definitions used. For example, Widget X may be defined by Author A to satisfy property T. Practically everyone else may prefer to define it as satisfying property S. Showing the equivalence between property T and property S may happen to be one of the harder but lesser known theorems in the past fifty years. If you ask the question, after reading a treatise by Author A, that "Why is property S true for Widget X?"; the common answer "duh, that's by definition" will probably not be very useful to you.