Your first objective in writing effective poll questions is to get people to think. Get their minds to engage in the topic you are polling. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Simple yes/no questions can suffice, or complicated responses will work.

My preference is simple, yes/no, true/false, or 3-4 multiple choice answers. I am not trying to solve the world’s problems, though as inviting as that sounds, with my single poll question.

If you make the responses easy to answer in a simple and straightforward manner, ask the question so that it accurately and honestly encapsulates the issue at hand. Here’s what I mean. If you want completely honest answers, you cannot slant the question to one side or the other.

Example: „Do you favor affordable health care for children?“ I can guarantee you that 98% of the respondents will say „Yes.“ Wouldn’t you? To me, that’s a dishonest or a faulty question. An honest question along those lines would be „Would you be willing to pay more taxes to reform the current health care system?“ Here I introduced a new concept that people might be opposed to: higher taxes. Now the question is fair and more balanced. I suspect that answer here would be 50/50 or 60/40 in favor of one or the other.

Next, make sure you cover all bases in your answer choices. For instance, yes, no, and I don’t know are really good options for answers when you want to know general opinion.

Avoid all-inclusive adverbs such as never, daily, none, always, all, etc. As an example, with the question: „do you always eat a fresh banana in the morning,“ the one time a person runs out of fresh bananas negates the other 99.82% of the time. Use words such as some, frequently, often, mostly, or few. This should help you to write honest and accurate questions,

And, as always, brevity is key in crafting a poll question. The simpler the question, the more likely someone will response. Recently, I asked an extremely simple question, „do you pray?“ My two answers were yes and no. Simple. To the point. Answerable. Either you do or you don’t.