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curiousdannii
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This is a site for people to ask questions of each other, where experts volunteer to increase the accessibility of world knowledge in a free and open way. This site is not a service site, whether that's proofreading, dictionary lookup, or language learning. Now sometimes there's a thin line between them, but that's the general principle. (And there aren't very many truly world-class experts here (I'm not!) but we're all kind of experts in our own way.)

Would it be right to go up to a university lecturer in English, or in Literature, or even in the narrow field of Stephen King Studies to ask that question? Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? I don't think so. You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.

No matter how much of an expert of English you are, unless you had a copy of the books to check you could not answer it at all. No amount of prior experience, no amount of formal study, no amount of practice would help. Only having the books and looking through them. That's how to know that the question is off topic.

This is a site for people to ask questions of each other, where experts volunteer to increase the accessibility of world knowledge in a free and open way. This site is not a service site, whether that's proofreading, dictionary lookup, or language learning. Now sometimes there's a thin line between them, but that's the general principle. (And there aren't very many truly world-class experts here (I'm not!) but we're all kind of experts in our own way.)

Would it be right to go up to a university lecturer in English, or in Literature, or even in the narrow field of Stephen King Studies to ask that question? Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? I don't think so. You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.

This is a site for people to ask questions of each other, where experts volunteer to increase the accessibility of world knowledge in a free and open way. This site is not a service site, whether that's proofreading, dictionary lookup, or language learning. Now sometimes there's a thin line between them, but that's the general principle. (And there aren't very many truly world-class experts here (I'm not!) but we're all kind of experts in our own way.)

Would it be right to go up to a university lecturer in English, or in Literature, or even in the narrow field of Stephen King Studies to ask that question? Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? I don't think so. You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.

No matter how much of an expert of English you are, unless you had a copy of the books to check you could not answer it at all. No amount of prior experience, no amount of formal study, no amount of practice would help. Only having the books and looking through them. That's how to know that the question is off topic.

Source Link
curiousdannii
  • 5.8k
  • 1
  • 16
  • 28

This is a site for people to ask questions of each other, where experts volunteer to increase the accessibility of world knowledge in a free and open way. This site is not a service site, whether that's proofreading, dictionary lookup, or language learning. Now sometimes there's a thin line between them, but that's the general principle. (And there aren't very many truly world-class experts here (I'm not!) but we're all kind of experts in our own way.)

Would it be right to go up to a university lecturer in English, or in Literature, or even in the narrow field of Stephen King Studies to ask that question? Would it be right to ask Stephen King himself? I don't think so. You'd go to a library and borrow the book! Or you'd search on Google Books or something like that. Questions like that absolutely do not belong here.