In this paper, we study a weaker version of classic slant helices in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^3$ or Minkowski space $\mathbb{R}^3_1$, which will be called general slant helices. We show that any classic slant helix is a general slant helix but the converse is not true. We also obtain equations involving the curvature and torsion that characterize this family of curves.