Abstract In asking a polar question, questioners set the topic, agenda, and terms of the response. While these can be resisted, whatever follows will be understood vis-à-vis the question because there is a shared social norm that when asked a question a recipient should respond. This chapter reveals that although often relatively little conscious thought is put into how speakers design questions, they are nonetheless finely calibrated for question recipients. This calibration is the work questioners do to ensure that questions receive an optimal answer response. At the broadest level, the two dimensions that questioners rely on are action and design. Questioners are accountable for offering or requesting (for instance) what they can reasonably expect their recipient to accept and for designing questions in ways that are well suited to their recipients in terms of polarity, prefaces that position the questions relative to ongoing interaction, and lexical choices.