So I was on the General Questions forum and I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question, and the immediate response was “We don’t do homework.” :mad::mad::mad: For the record, it is not a homework question. It was for my personal amusement and a fiction project I’m working on. But I’ll come over here to vent.
WTF is the point of a question forum if people aren’t allowed to ask questions? I thought that if I wrote my question in a thorough and carefully constructed manner, I would get the best possible answer and I wouldn’t need to ask follow-up questions. Apparently the assumption is that a cogent and well-written question is obviously beyond the ability of mere mortals like myself, and can only have come from a textbook. WTF kind of logic is that?
Obviously it’s not possible for me to prove that my question is “not” homework. Am I supposed to write poorly-conceived questions with lots of misspellings and incomplete thoughts? What is the threshold for literacy above which you will get accused of asking homework questions?
It’s a standard response in GQ if you pose your question in the form of a homework assignment. It just shows that you have a very specific and well thought out question. You said it wasn’t homework, I’m sure you’ll get some useful answers now.
Because it sounds like a homework question. Your problem is not that you didn’t make enough misspellings. Your problem is that your question is asking for basic information that a capable adult should be able to find at least a brief overview of on their own. Had you asked something about the Meiji Restoration or the Kazoku, I doubt usedtobe would have jumped on you like that.
Don’t let one response set you off. It was just a poster being a junior mod, and a little snarky and unreasonably suspect. As you can see the mod gave them a smack down for it, and rightly so.
Having clarified that it’s not homework, you’ll likely get some help. But it might help if your question was less general, not something easily googled!
Ah, it had the flavor of a homework essay. You asked a broad question, easily researched on-line, without any explanation of why you would want to know it. The “homework” answer wasn’t maybe the tactful, but (if I knew anything about the Japanese clan system), my answer would have been something like “That’s a broad subject – if you tell us why you’re interested, it would be easier to focus on the relevant details.”
In fact, your basic technique for asking the question was completely wrong for the internet. As has been known since Usenet days, the best way to get a long and completely accurate dissertation on any subject is to make an incorrect assertion about that subject.
So if you had started a thread in Great Debates with the claim: “The adoption of Jeffersonian democracy by feudal Japan and their rejection of the clan system directly led to their defeat in the Russo Japanese war in 1905”, you probably would have gotten all the information you wanted.
It didn’t look like anything like homework to me. For one thing, the subject isn’t something that would typically be assigned in primary or secondary school. Secondly, I think it’s sufficiently complicated that a simple on-line search would probably not have given a complete answer.
The “no homework” rule is a relic of the early days of this site, before Wikipedia and other resources existed, when I gather some students did ask homework questions here. I think it’s quite rare these days that anyone comes here asking actual homework questions.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that some posters are so quick to accuse others of asking homework questions. I would prefer that posters be given the benefit of the doubt, unless someone is very clearly asking to have an essay written for them or asking to have a math problem sheet done. And whatever the case, it should be reported rather than making the accusation (unless of course the poster actually does state outright that it’s homework).
Hey bitches wassup I got a question about Japanese clans because I like ninjas and shit so if you can tell me if they still do that or what it would be cool pps not homework peace out
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was unnecessarily rude and immature.
Heaven help the student who actually does come to this site asking people to do his homework. Dopers delight in posting so much bullshit that any student who used it would get an “F,” plus having the paper circulated among the teachers for laughs.
If a train leaves the station at 1 pm and travels at a rate of 72 mph. Another train leaves the same station an hour later and travels at rate of 90 mph. The second train follows the same route as the first, on a track parallel to the first. How long will it take the second train to catch up to the first?
But if you fire a laser from the second train, it would exceed the speed of light, proving that relativity is a lie, and incidentally, blasting the first train before it even left the station.