For example I’ll send an e-mail with 3 questions and will only get an answer to one of the questions. It’s worse when there are 2 yes/no questions with a question that is obviously not a yes/no question. Then I get a response of
Yes
back in the e-mail. So which question are they answering?
Mainly I’m asking all of you why do people insist on only answering 1 question out of an e-mail where there are multiple? Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?
Edit at this point I’ve got the answers . Some are too lazy to actually read. Some admit they get focused on one item and forget to go back. I understand the second group. The first group yeah no excuse there.
Continuing edit: there are comments where people have tried the bullet points and they say it still doesn’t help. I might put the needed questions in red.
I usually number my questions, makes it more obvious
Yes.
Take your upvote and choke on it, prick.
/s
I didn’t expect !inclusiveor@lemmy.blahaj.zone followed by !angryupvote@sh.itjust.works
Bet you didn’t expect this either
No one expects it… But what a show! Damn, the song will be stuck in my head for days now
🎶Sit on my face and tell me that you love me🎶
Considering your wording in the last paragraph, I’m going to guess that your writing style is frequently overwhelming. Making sure that questions are clearly isolated (I’d suggest using numeric lists or bullet points) makes it clear what response you’re expecting.
Additionally, if you’re asking several difficult questions, it’s likely that people will lose the thread partway through.
This. It’s pretty common in my industry for people to either copy and paste your bullets into their reply and put their responses directly after each or edit your original email in the chain with the answers in red below the bullets.
I work in text.
You can keep your infix replies and fancy colors. I want my replies to look like forwarded email as per rfc1855.
We need a bot for that.
Same. At my work and everywhere I’ve worked, almost everyone responds like that to emails with multiple questions in them. It’s either OP’s workplace is an outlier or his formatting isn’t conducive enough for people to respond appropriately.
If you put it in red, loads of people will read it in black. Dont use html.
This is what I was thinking too. Failure to exercise brevity is the leading cause of people not having the time for your email.
Failure to exercise brevity
That’s a wonderful wording!
Yeah that’s gonna become part of my vernacular.
Considering your wording in the last paragraph
I’m really confused by people’s reaction to OP here. I agree that I personally don’t share OP’s experiences, but what’s wrong with that last paragraph? It’s not overwhelming at all, so how does it indicate that their writing style is overwhelming? (I know MINE is, no need to point that out)
If people have trouble understanding it, then reading comprehension must really be at rock bottom.
I agree that formatting is important with l proper text length, but this is literally two lines, this isn’t in need of bullet points.
If people have trouble understanding it, then reading comprehension must really be at rock bottom.
If 90% of people have bad reading comprehension then it doesn’t do much for anyone to point that out and stick to the way you are writing instead of making it understandable to everyone.
OP’s last paragraph contains three question marks and essentially one question - the first is their actual question with the following two being escalating statements. If you threw this into a work email with five other questions some people’s brains would seize up and just refuse to answer more than one question because they’re not certain if there are six or eight genuine questions.
In life and especially a professional setting we’re interacting with people in the top 1% of communication skills… and the bottom 25%.
Not OP, but I experience difficulty articulating what I mean while staying formal. How to improve?
Bullet points. If you don’t have a rapport spell things out paragraph style and then finish the email off with something like this…
So considering the above I’d like to get your opinion on these points:
-
Do you think the widget should be blue or orange?
-
Given the expected market impact do we want to bring in PR for our e-widget announcement?
-
I’m sorry but there is no difference between putting them in bullet points, or typing like I did. People need to learn to read.
Side note :
I’ve tried bullet points.
I’ve tried putting multiple return carriages between each question.
I’ve putting all the questions end on end
and it makes no difference end result is the same.
Add in a lot of the other comments saying they have the same problem it isn’t just me
People need to learn to read.
But it seems you’re the one having the issue. Rather than hoping people will learn to read better it might be a better option to write in a way that caters to those bad readers.
Try being more direct, you can still write out your whole email with the full description, but put in a section somewhere that’s easy to see that’s labeled as “QUESTIONS” and then enumerate the questions you want answered. I often will have the whole section bold and further highlight important words in red. This makes it easier for people to answer inline on the reply and helps ensure questions weren’t missed.
The truth is, most people don’t like the ‘email’ part of the job and may only check it once or twice a day and I’d most likely just skimming through several messages and not fully devoting much time to each message. By making it easier for them to reply you end up with a better result.
You can also use this when you expect someone to take action from your email. Let them know precisely what you want them to do, and make it very easy to find ‘The Ask’.
EDIT: Or, you can just downvote any comments that actually offer suggestions and stay of the opinion that everyone else is wrong and only you are correct.
“Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?”
Not much, what is going on with you?
I KNOW THIS ONE AND THE ANSWER IS : IT"S MICROSOFT’S FAULT.
Back in the day when Email first became popular, it was normal and accepted use to do “in-line-quoting”. You would hit “reply” and get the text of the original mail with a quote character, mostly “>” in the begining of the line. Then you would put some empty lines at the point where you wanted to answer/comment and type your reply in the middle of the email you received, easily giving context to your words, and making it obvious to what this comment relates, while also showing which part was by the sender and which by you (due to the quotation symbols)
This was a very good system, and then came MICROSOFT OUTLOOK
and they defaulted to giving you a empty page when clicking reply and just dumping the whole mail you replied to somewhere below, out of sight.
everyone using Outlook started “top-posting” to the annoyance of every intelligent being in the galaxy, but because Outlook was the first email experience many people had, the culture of in-line-quoting was destroyed by the unwashed microsoft masses.
fast-forward to today, where a young person (that is below 50) posts about a topic just to vent, and a old person (over 9000) replies with a sincere history lessen from a time where even email were better.
yours truely,
someone who is still salty about that and just decided to make a youtube rant about it.
It reverses the natural flow of the conversation.
Why is top-posting so bad?
Top-posting.
What’s the worst thing I can do when writing a reply to the mailing list?
Sounds almost like
lastly (doThis (then (first input)))Method chaining ftw Input.then().doThis().lastly()
Also it formats better.
Sorry, I prefer
input |> then |> doThis |> lastly
I’m a younger person (32) and didn’t know about this norm until I saw an older person doing it. Now I do it as well but make it obvious what the intent is.
For example:
Hello (person),
See responses below in red
Blah blah blah original email text
Red text
Blah blah blah
Red text
Etc.
It works really well. Said person will even respond in green to my red. We do all this in new outlook, which to be fair, is still a mess for other reasons. Don’t even get me started on the search lol
I dont use ms products, but I can’t believe that’s the default. Very rarely does someone reply to me without the message quoted. And most still quote lines manually with >
Honestly, what I would like and I’ve never seen is a 2-pane reply window; left side is the reply, blank, and the right side is the previous emal. Both panes are scrollable, and if you highlight something on the right side, there’s a <— button in between that lets you shoot that text to the reply pane as a quote then continue composing as usual.
That might be nice for replies on social media like this, too.
You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.
-
Question 1
-
Question 2
-
Question 3
I’ll do this and they STILL only answer the first question
Send separate emails. Schedule them 15 minutes apart.
This is so extra when motherfuckers could just read.
“Thank you for your answer to my first question. Could you please also address questions 2 and 3?”
At least by numbering the questions you make it easier to re-ask them.
Reply:
One down, two to go!
This.
And if they don’t answer all three, the only response they get is a repeat of the missing question.
After a day.
this is the way. if you really want the highest chance of all questions being answered, number them.
jokes on you, they still wont respond them, or even mark which one they responded to. you have to send 3 different messages even if emails
Tried that. Got the same result
Try again.
-
It’s not that they “insist” on not answering, they just have limited reading comprehension and/or attention span. With experience you learn to ask exactly one question in an email, and maybe you’ll get an answer some of the time, and if you’re lucky it will be coherent.
It really is a sad State of affairs that reading comprehension is so bad that people can’t answer questions in written form.
I mean it’s literally written down you can’t miss it.
And to clarify this is more of me complaining because I’ve experienced this a lot. It’s most apparent in online discussions, where seemingly a majority of what you say gets completely skipped missed or misinterpreted and replies often focus on just a couple words of your statement instead of understanding sometimes even just a whole paragraph.
if we’re referring to people in the U.S. it’s important to remember that over half of the population can’t read beyond a 6th grade level. -That’s according to our own Former-Department of Education.
It is a sad state but it’s like the weather, you can complain about it or dress for it.
… Or both?
Why make a false dichotomy out of it?
I enjoy raging against it.
Good point, I rant about winter all the time.
try numbering them
OK, there are thousands, possibly millions of people who do this.
Reluctant upvote
My colleagues complain of the same things, saying they’ve tried everything. But I never have that issue.
Here’s an example of what they might send: Hello Bob, we have just recieved all your documents, so thank you. But upon review, we have found that we are still missing x,y,z. In order to expedite the process we ask for your cooperation.
- At your earliest convenience, can you please send not more than twelve months of documents x and how they pertain to y?
- Can you clarify why z contains a substantial difference from the previous times it occurred in September 2020, October 2020? Don’t hesitate to contact us with any further questions!
Here’s what I would say instead: Hi Bob, to finish the file we require:
- A max 12 months of documents x (showing y)
- Why is z now so different from 2020 Sept, Oct? Thanks in advance.
I know of 5 people I work with who will moat likely send you 10 months of documents x (showing y) as a response to your example, 12 if you are lucky.
No, they will not even acknowledge #2. They would have the same reaponse to your first, wordier version because they are just doing the first request and barely noticed you had a two digit number.
That’s the point where you start with the “Thank you! In case you missed it…”
Almost never fails to get an apology and a smug feeling of superiority. God, I hate those people. Luckily I don’t have to work with those brainless corpo drones too much.
I do a mix of both.
Start short and get to the point.
Add any extra crap below it.
Hey Bob we need X/Y/Z to finish the thing. Can you send it ASAP so we can continue.
Additional details:
- X is needed because of blah blah blah. Confirming the measurement and parts needed.
- Y is needed for compliance reporting in sister department in case of an audit.
- Z is requested by the project manager to justify additional man hours and assign more staff so we can meet the deadline.
This is the correct answer. If people aren’t answering all your questions, your not formatting your questions properly.
Cause frankly, your email is the 235th most important thing on my desk today.
Until it Cascades into a massive problem because you didn’t read, which likely came from the 235 other times you didn’t read and now you have to backtrack yet again. I’ve never been at a job that didn’t have this exact issue. Everyone working extra hard to be lazy.
Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?
I can read
Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.
Solutions (workarounds):
- Email is structured with “executive summary” & “detail”. That way I can write all the words I want but people can only read the first paragraph.
- Never ask questions. Tell them what I’m going to choose, & give them opportunity to disagree. That way if they don’t respond usefully I can take their “non-response” as a response & proceed anyway.
- If I need to ask a question, use a phone call or go to their desk, or (shudder) make a meeting.
Poor reading comprehension skills are more prevalent than we think
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level). source
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
Ignoring the slightly superfluous ‘average’, but… Wow. I’m surprised. I guess there’s a lot of people in far rural areas, or impoverished, or just surfing is their life (California has the lowest adult literacy!), who never learnt to read.
In CA the inland is full of dumb rednecks and the coast is full of smart immigrants.
CA probably has the highest literacy rate of any state…in Hindi, or Mandarin lol
The level of frustration from online discussions when the things you say are entirely missed or misinterpreted is a great example of this.
Even mildly complex topics that touch anything politically charged or emotionally charged tend to be subject to groupthink dynamics in a format where group think is largely just a result of poor reading comprehension.
I will put 3 simple 1 sentence questions in a numbered list and get a single answer back.
Idgaf any more I just copy/paste the same 3 questions and send it back.
No.
