Tom.Thomson (3/9/2011)
Most of the time no-one bothers to be precise - the common feeling is something like "what's the point of complete precision" (except when writing about mathematical logic, or formally provable correctness of algorithms, or that sort of thing) - but in QOTD we unfortunately see a trick question now and again and as a result any imprecision (no matter how slight) risks being interpreted very carefully, unlike normal everyday speech or writing - just look at the number of comments saying something like "I got it wrong because I thought it was a trick question" or of really ludicrous things like the recent suggestion that the use of the word "drive" in one of Steve's RAID questions made it into trick a question.
You've hit the nail on the head there. It's certainly not easy writing questions - or anything for that matter - in such a way as to guarantee being understood correctly by everyone. After all, our language skills as humans are geared for speech, where imprecision doesn't matter as much since you can always explain yourself afterwards.
And it's not just QOTD - I've seen a number of questions on Microsoft certification exams where I've thought "If I interpret it this way its 'A', but if I interpret it the other way it's 'B'". In the end I have to go for what I felt was the most likely interpretation to make it a decent question and hope that's correct.
So I do admire anyone that writes questions here, and as someone who does so myself the ensuing discussions are always useful for me to learn how I could have improved the format or wording of the question to avoid being misunderstood.
Duncan