How can I clarify my question and thereby avoid accumulating close votes?

Question

[Original request: If this question is clear enough now then please retract your close votes.]

How to resolve my Indian aunt's inter-personal and inter-cultural conflict with her American daughter-in-law's mother?

My question had attracted 2 early close votes for being

'unclear what you are asking'

so I have rewritten the title to accurately summarise the problem and also added relevant information in the question based on feedback from members in comments.

Since the person(s) who cast the close-vote(s) are in the best position to help improve the question, could you write an answer explaining how I might to improve it so that 2 close votes do not become 5.

A stitch in time....

Prevention is better than cure.

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Update:

the number of close votes has gone up to 3 (all for 'not clear what you are asking') even after I made edits to clarify my question.

What is still unclear in my question? How can I make it clearer?

Please note that I am not really asking members who did not close-vote, what might be wrong with the question, at this point. All 3 close-votes say 'not clear what you are asking' at present.

Answer 1

The editing job which I might have suggested is going to harm the answers already posted. It's a bit late to chop down the trees in order to see the footpath.

When someone writes an answer that begins with

Allow me to say that reading your story felt like watching a comedy show.

First of all, cats don't resent being called Kitty but they usually don't like being picked up by strangers.

That tells me the question is on the rambling side. Asking if cats resent being called "kitty" is distracting and facetious. The "problem" itself seems light-hearted and airy, which is fine if the original question is really asking "Do cats not like being called ‘kitty’? Luckily, the title makes it clear that the question is a serious one.

How to resolve my Indian aunt's inter-personal and inter-cultural conflict with her American daughter-in-law's mother?

But it is a bit wordy, perhaps it needs to be summarised:

How to restore harmony between an Indian mother and her American daughter-in-law's mother?

The note at the beginning is helpful but it is also distracting, I would place it at the end of the question or with a title "Disclaimer" and the rest in small type. The user nominated has deleted their comment so why mention their name? Again, extraneous and unnecessary information.

For example:

Disclaimer

_{Someone asked me what is my role in all this? Good question. I am not at all close with Aunt but I am close with my cousin (son of Aunt) and he needs help to keep his mother and mother-in-law peaceable. Unfortunately, he is a member at Stack Overflow under his real name and he feels vaguely disloyal to his mother to ask this question here himself. Call it Indian Sentiment, but it's all right because I have sent him the link and he will read all your advice himself, to help him act as an effective mediator and quickly resolve this interpersonal conflict!}

Answer 2

I would suggest one more edit to the title, along the lines of

How can my cousin restore harmony between his Indian mother and American mother-in-law?

You're really asking for advice on your cousin's behalf, and the whole string of relationships in aunt's daughter-in-law's mother is hard to parse. Putting your cousin at the center of the relationship tree makes the relationships clearer, and is appropriate to your question.

Answer 3

Note: this answer was written when the question was primarily a request for close votes to be retracted.

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Campaigning on Meta, not to reopen a question, but merely for the retraction of close votes really is overkill. Don't post when there isn't actually an actionable problem.

To explain a little more, what you are asking for here is actually harmful. By retracting close votes those voters will forever lose the ability to vote to close the question. If you for some reason edited the question further such that it would be unclear or too broad in a different way, or if the site rules changed in the future in some way such that the question would then be off-topic (it has happened on many sites), they would be unable to vote to close at that time. Retraction is a feature with rare utility.

It is much better to just let the votes expire. Having a couple of close votes lingering on a question for a week or two is not a problem. And if the question continues to gain close votes then that might indicate that you haven't actually fixed it as much as you think you have.