Reward The Clever Player

I have often heard that one of the mantras of old school play is player skill as opposed to character skills. Rather than have the player simply make a skill roll to do somthing, the player should describe how he is doing it. Success or failure is not random. However it does occur to me (for example) that a player having spent a few minutes cleverly describing how they intend to find and deactivate a trap could still fail based on what the trap actually is. And a moment of player brilliance is wasted. That effort not having been rewarded might not be so forthcoming in the future. To avoid this I intend to do more with less. What I mean is to not detail things as much and let the players fill in the blanks. Instead if stocking a dungeon room with a spicific trap, just note that there is a trap there. If the player has a good idea about if there is and what the trap is then presto , thats what it is. And of course its disarmed. The player having been rewarded for his effort will put more into playing in the future and the quality of your game will increase.