English Communication Skill: Asking Questions- Secrets of Open-Ended Questions

Increasing your question asking skill is indeed the skill experts say will do the most for career advancement.  And increasing your skill in asking questions will make your conversations more interesting – for the other person and you!

And here is a tip for you.  When you can, ask open-ended questions.

Unlike simple yes-or-no questions, open-ended questions  allow the respondent to talk – and enable you to get much more information.   Questions requiring a “yes” or “no” limit choices and force a decision.  On the other hand, when you want to find out a person’s opinion or gather some facts (especially during the course of a negotiation) the more you can get the other person to talk, the more information you learn.

Here is an example of a simple closed-ended question requiring a yes–or-no answer:

“Do you like this car?”

An open-ended question, on the other hand, encourages the person to talk:

“What do you like about this car?”

Here are some classic open-ended questions when you want to get information.  They invite the other person to open up:

“What happened next?”

“So how did that make you feel?”

“Tell me about that.”

Go to the next level in question asking. Go to open-ended questions.

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.