Have any tips for editing questions?

Question

With more users gaining rep to suggest and make edits, I thought it would be useful to gather some tips for editing questions. Our questions should be viewed like nuggets of gold - they are what keep great people coming back to the site and encourage quality posts all round! Editing is encouraged to get a little more shine out of a post, and approved edits even gain rep.

Please feel free to add to the c-wiki answer below or write your own answer if you have enough to say on the topic.

(Note - while related, this is not "how to ask questions". For that, read a great post on the Super User blog.)

Answer 1

After reading and understanding a question, here's some ways to shine a question into gold:

Title

A good title is all about good first impressions and is what encourages someone to click on a question in the first place.

• Make sure it's direct, to the point, and matches the content. This saves people time and encourages those with knowledge of the topic to click.

• Phrase it in the form of a question. This looks more inviting and professional.

• Include important keywords that people might search for. This makes the question more likely to attracts clicks from people making web searches.

• Move content that looks like a tag into a tag, e.g. "Web Part - Question" to web-part. The primary tag is shown in the browser title bar anyway.

Content

Now that someone is reading the question, we want to keep them here - engaged and interested.

• Remove any "noise", e.g. salutations and sign-offs, repetition. Again, this saves people time and reduces friction when reading the question.

• Correct any spelling and grammar, but don't change meaning - leave if unsure. Again, this makes the question look more professional with the intention of attracting quality answers (and other quality questions).

• Correct any formatting issues: errors belong in quotes and code belongs in code blocks, and also break large blocks of text into paragraphs. Again, this makes the question more readable and inviting to the eye.

Tagging

• Please read How do I use tags appropriately?