My Question/Comment Philosophy
While I was a grad student, I found myself sometimes asking questions or making comments in seminars and then realizing I felt silly for speaking up. Sometimes, this may have occurred because of the response I got, but more often than not I think that feeling was justified. No one teaches you how to ask questions during a seminar in grad school, but it's an important class of professional interactions. I tried very hard to improve the quality of my questions and I think I've come a long way (by no means am I perfect though, and I still catch myself breaking my own rules). Here are my "rules" for asking good questions. These are mainly aimed at economics-style seminars with questions throughout are are by no means objective; they're just the ideas I aim to follow.
- Be constructive
Or if not constructive, at least be curious. In most cases, the reason for asking a question should be to help the speaker achieve some better outcome. Questions can be constructive in many ways. Asking for clarification demonstrates that something is unclear and increases the chance that you or another audience member asks a helpful question later. Asking a question that exposes a major flaw in early-stage work can help a researcher avoid sinking excess time into a project. Sometimes, if it's clear that the audience is struggling with a concept or idea you understand, a well-wortded question can be constructive by broadening the set of people following the talk. Most often, though, a constructive question helps the speaker explore new assumptions , framings, empirical tests, etc. that they had not previously considered.
I say "if not constructive, at least be curious" because depending on the setting it may be positive to ask a question simply because you want to know the answer, rather than to add something. Sometimes, these two things overlap, but you shouldn't assume that they do.
- Be respectful of the speaker
Firstly, this means be polite. Secondly, unless you work on an extremely related topic, the presenter has thought about the material many orders of magnitude times harder than you have. Never assume that the presenter hasn't thought of something or doesn't understand a concept/idea/method. It's easy to turn a relatively rude and assuming question, e.g. "Why didn't you use Conley standard errors?", into a relatively polite and constructive one "Do you think there's potential spatial autocorrelation in the errors?".
- Be concise
Most questions are too long. Rambling questions detract from the speaker's and the audience's time. Formulate the question in your head before you speak.
- Consider whether the seminar is the correct forum for your question
There are many avenues for the exchange of scholarly ideas. The special element of a talk is that there is an audience. This introduces a temptation for performative questions, showing off your smarts without adding much to the work. Asking these kinds of questions generally detracts from the audience experience. It is much more difficult and impressive to come up with a useful question or suggestion than a pithy or seemingly smart sounding takedown. In my experience, people pay attention to this.
Generally, a question that should be asked in a seminar helps the audience get more from the talk. Maybe your question sparks another question or thought from the audience which leads to some useful takeaway. Questions that are ultra-specific, require a lot of explanation, or that potentially lead to a lengthy dialogue are better saved for a meeting post-talk or an email.
- Be engaged, but allow your mind to wander a bit
This is a little hard to explain. An excellent talk is designed to keep you on track. The best presentations make it difficult to ask useful questions because the presenter has optimized for keeping you "on the rails." I find it useful to purposefully disengage for short stretches of time, maybe 2 minutes, and kind of free associate with what I've heard. The purpose of this is to allow myself the headspace to explore what's been presented and potentially come up with something useful. Put differently, most questions arise from you "coming off the rails," so when a talk is very well-crafted it can be difficult to ask constructive questions, not necessarily because the work can't be improved, but because the presentation is so smooth.Of course, when you stop pating attention you run the risk of missing something important, so choose when to do this wisely and remember to come back quickly.