Too Many Words? Not Enough? Or Just the Wrong Ones?

Earlier today I was helping my sister with her AP English homework assignment. Her problem wasn't that she didn't know how to do the work, it was that she couldn't figure out what the prompt was asking for. On my way back to school (I live about an hour away, I drive back and forth three times a week for the youth soccer team I coach) I was thinking about how we, as teachers, affects how students think about problems.

Should our focus be on making students have to think critically about what the actual question is or should it be on the actual material of the assignment? To me this seems incredibly obvious but I was talking with some friends and it seems that in high school at least teachers often make students figure out what the question is before they can even think about how they would respond to it. It seems that if different teachers across the school, district, state, and nation use different styles for asking questions that students in their class could be at an advantage or disadvantage in any sort of standardized tests that students have to take.

On the other side of the coin, do students ever learn to think critically about questions they are asked if the questions they are given are simple and direct? I suppose that the subject of the assignment would generally allow for a direct question to be posed so that the student has to do some critical thinking. If that's the case then what would be the positives for using such indirect and often confusing questions?

Is there any sort of middle ground with this, or is it simply a direct or indirect method of questioning?

When I went to look up some examples of this (I don't remember the question my sister was responding to), it seems there is very little if any research on this topic. The majority of the research has to do with word order and leading questions in surveys. There didn't seem to be anything on whether or not there was a difference between asking direct and indirect questions. If anyone knows where I could find something, that would be quite helpful.