Which Part of the Error-Message Structure Is Never Optional
This subject's error-message structure has three parts: what went wrong, why (if it helps), and how to fix it. One of these three is explicitly optional and can be skipped deliberately.
Which one — and which one must never be missing?
The correct answer is "Why is optional; how-to-fix must always be present."
The what/why/how-to-fix structure treats "why" as a checklist item to include only when the cause is actionable — skip it when the real cause is meaningless or exposes internal implementation details to a non-technical user (a connection-reset error code, for instance). "What" and "how to fix it" are not optional: a message with no next step is described as "not finished, no matter how clear the 'what' is," which is exactly why the how-to-fix clause is the one constant across every example in this subject.
The distractors get the structure backwards or wrong: "what" being optional would leave a user with no idea what happened at all, which this subject never treats as acceptable; "how-to-fix" being optional is the one thing explicitly ruled out — it's cut "never by default," unlike "why"; and "none are optional" overstates the rule — the subject is specific that the why clause is cut deliberately in cases like the upload-failure example, not treated as mandatory in every message.
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