The Question Is the Tool. Shape It Before You Swing.

A question is not a neutral request for information. It is a tool you press against a source, and its shape decides what comes back. Three tests tell you, before you ask, whether a question is sharp.

Test 1 — Open or closed? A closed question can be answered "yes" or "no" and then it's over. "Did Watergate involve you?" — "No." Dead end. An open question forces the source to produce something: what, how, why, in what way. Closed questions are for confirming a fact you already half-know; open questions are for discovering one you don't.

Test 2 — Specific or vague? "Tell me about the crash" invites a shrug. "How fast were the cars going when they hit?" demands a number. Name the exact thing — the moment, the metric, the format — and you constrain the source into a real answer instead of a safe, useless generalisation. Frost's broad questions let Nixon drift; his specific one trapped him.

Test 3 — Clean or loaded? A loaded question smuggles an assumption inside it. Loftus changed one verb — "smashed" instead of "hit" — and witnesses remembered faster cars and broken glass that were never there. The question didn't retrieve the memory; it contaminated it. If your question contains the answer you expect, you'll get it back — whether it's true or not.

The sharpest questions are open, specific, and clean all at once. Run the three tests on your own question before you ask it — especially when the source is an AI that will happily fill any vague or loaded prompt with confident, plausible noise.