Submitted 3 days ago by andrewta@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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?
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.
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 go 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!
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
Your own report suggests there is a difference. People aren’t answering your questions. You do not have their attention apparently.
The burden is on you to get your questions answered. Other people have other concerns. Like it or not, you have to do the work of getting these answers. You may need to have a conversation instead of a list of demands.
Perhaps try an email thread instead of a single monolithic email?
Open the thread with a single key question. Listen to their reply. Does your next question still pertain? Then ask it in your reply.
People are not vending machines that contain answers you must shake out of them. A proper relationship, even if just email, is still the best way to achieve your goals.
My two cents as a person who experienced such frustrations early in my career.
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’.
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.
Not OP, but I also have very hard time articulating what I mean while keeping it formal. How do I improve on this front?
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?
“Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?”
Not much, what is going on with you?
Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?
I can read
S-trier trolling right here.
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.
You can’t just say you made a youtube rant about it without posting a link.
just decided
Appears to imply they have yet to make it
They probably didn’t do it by default because of Rule 4. However, I think there should be an exception when other users ask for links. (Maybe the rule should be, “No unsolicited self promotion”?)
For the record, I would also like to see this rant.
I said I **will **make one, and as soon as I **did ** i will post the link (*)
(*) as a person with ADHD, the chances of both those things happening before the heat death of the universe indistinguishable from zero.
I 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 x)))
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
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’s how I write code and I can’t stand text editors that make it difficult to have side by side panes of two files or the same file
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 >
It’s not that they “insist” on not answering, they just have limited reading comprehension and/or attention span. In the business world you learn to ask exactly one question in an email, and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get an answer.
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.
It is a sad state but it’s like the weather, you can complain about it or dress for it.
Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.
Solutions (workarounds):
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.
“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.
Tried that. Got the same result
Try again.
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
this is the way. if you really want the highest chance of all questions being answered, number them.
Agreed, especially if you’re writing to someone who’s not completely fluent in the language. Also use short sentences and common vocabulary.
No.
I started listing the questions as 1. 2. 3. And so on. Which helped a lot.
I hate when i di that and they still refuse to answer more than one
At least now you can rely back with “can you also provide feedback for #1 & #3?”
Repeat until all items are cleared. Not perfect, but at least you don’t have to waste time rewording a follow-up email.
Few people can focus enough to read.
I work in a technical field. In the past few years I’ve learned that interacting by email usually requires one-line sentences or bullet points, with any questions being numbered. No fluff, no secondary thoughts or possibilities. Keep it as minimal as possible.
It still fails to elicit a coherent response about half the time, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.
It didn’t use to be like this. But what’s to blame; screen addiction, microplastics, covid, increased stress, … ?
Schools (both K-12 and university) keep loosening their expectations of students, and now we have kids starting college with 6th grade reading levels.
School administrators don’t want their graduation stats to look bad, and universities don’t want to lose $$ by flunking students out, so there’s a massive conflict of interest that is ultimately resulting in a disservice to students and society at large.
The other day, I saw this 8th grade graduation exam from a small town in Kentucky in 1912, and it drives home how much things have changed:
What is a Personal Pronoun?
A whole bunch of angry Americans would fail to answer that question correctly these days…
That might explain younger workers, but those in their 50s and above are just as bad.
I’m sorry but what the fuck is number 2 under arithmetic?
…but some things don’t. “Locate Servia on a map?”
They can’t even blame that on autocorrect; obviously the text was originally written on a qwerty keyboard though.
I don’t disagree it’s a focus thing for many people. I’m often stunned at the lack of comprehension or attention to detail using any medium, even in person (also technical field).
Like look, I just said to do what you’re asking would require 250 firewall rules…why are you now talking as if firewall rules aren’t required? I even went through the simplest math out loud during this meeting, so everyone would understand how I came up with that number and didn’t just pull it out of my ass.
People pay attention to what they want to pay attention to (or as my grandfather would say - people hear what they want to hear). If those questions aren’t a high priority for their own work, they simply don’t see them.
For OP: email is a terrible medium for such things, unless there’s been a conversation about it, and this is part of moving a project forward. Anything out of left field isn’t important to your audience, and… people dislike comitting to anything in email. As you work with people up the food chain, you’ll find less and less happens via verifiable comms like email (which is archived).
Everyone should be required to take Plain Language writing courses.
There’s a lot of factors at play, but who cares really. Writing in plain language makes it accessible for everyone and doesn’t hurt anyone.
Yes. If you’re going to add context, it better be after your main point or main question. Most people just want to know what you’re ultimately trying to convey and will not read the entire thing.
People read the subject line, assuming it’s not longer than about seven words, and then the first 30%, and last 15% of your email, in my experience. You can increase this by adding line breaks and bullets. In my experience, the best responses come from a short paragraph, followed by a couple bullet points, then a couple sentences, then your salutation/signature. I try not to write anything longer than that.
This. OP is mistaken if he thinks all people had to carefully read all email. We techies love to explain things too much, but executives are administrators, they don’t delve into technical details unless needed.
My technique to get busy executives to answer my emails is being direct and brief.
That’s it. If they need more, they will ask you. If you need more, send three emails, or make it very clear in the first line that you’re asking three things, and make them a bullet list.
That’s right. The brains of these super-efficient high performers and most valuable members of our society are so above everyone else, that they need babysitting and special care taken of their needs. It’s why they also deserve to get paid so much more than everyone else and not have any actual responsibility for their genius decisions!
Every day I feel so bad for these leaders and am inspired by the self-sacrifice they bring to make the world a better place.
Yep. Basically you need to respect their time, and not ask them to duplicate the work you’ve already done. This is especially important for executives, but works well on anyone… if you really need someone to do a thing or answer a question, make it easy for them to focus on completing your ask.
Address the email to one person who you need action from.
Tell them succinctly:
Why is this important? What do you need from them right now?
After that, preemptively provide the answers to any followup questions they might ask - give them further context so they don’t have to dig for it. Don’t ask them to read a whole email string below if you can summarize it.
Because people choose the easiest question to answer. You can’t change people, but you can change how you communicate.
For me it’s not intentional. I get fixated on one of the questions that require more mental energy than the others and then forget to answer the rest. I have no excuses. My bad.
People are lazy and stupid, you can ask one question at a time or better yet setup a meeting to ask them verbally, you aren’t getting any answers otherwise
try numbering them
OK, there are thousands, possibly millions of people who do this.
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). That’s for the US – Globally illiteracy levels skyrocket to 86%. 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.
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.
People are lazy, they get so many emails each day, they couldn’t be bothered reading messages properly. I have turned into a cynical annoying person and write emails with large clear action points like this:
Hi, I have some comments and questions.
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And then keep forwarding the original email every day until I get the required information. When the boss asks why no progress has been made, I can show him the email trail asking for information.
Cover your ass, keep adding the same questions until you get an answer.
TBH this is a bit wordy
No, we can test groksponk without flibbertygibbet. But, when rolling to production, flubbertygibbet will need to be in place before grokspunk due to how the gonksponk end-user documentation is written (at least, for now).
Oh, sorry, “doohicky” is how me and my team call them. They are actually <link to ISO specification for purchase>, specifically chapter 4, section 2 (in my 2012 copy it is titled “Hippydip Operations and Serialization”). Hopefully that connects well with the existing goober documentation, but let me know if you need further details/clarification.
Cause frankly, your email is the 235th most important thing reaching me 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.
How are the questions formatted?
This. Use bullets or bold each question so the number of questions is clear before each question is fully read.
In a workplace environment, I shouldn’t have to format emails as if they’re to be read by a 12 year old.
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.
Here’s what I would say instead: Hi Bob, to finish the file we require:
Reading comprehension has gone down the tubes. I dunno if it’s from people watching too many TikToks and their attention span can’t handle reading more than one sentence anymore, or what, but I have definitely noticed a change in people’s ability to read and understand the content of what they just read.
Where I work, my old boss never wrote anything down, did not like to communicate via email, and insisted on phone calls/verbal meetings instead. When they announced they were taking a new job, we begged them to create an SOP of all the things they did with detailed instructions because NONE of it had ever been written down. We were told no, they couldn’t do that. No explanation other than “I can’t.” And I’m convinced that they simply couldn’t read, or could BARELY read.
So I created the SOP instead, detailed as hell, everything in one place. Sections, subsections, hyperlinks, it’s all there. 2 new employees come into the office, I’m supposed to train them. I do, and I show them the SOP, tell them “everything you need to know is in this SOP”, so that AFTER I train them, they can reference it.
They never reference it, ever. They ask me how to do the things they’ve forgotten instead. I just point them to the correct section in the SOP and tell them to read it. BUT THEY DON’T READ. It’s insane! How do they get by in life in general!?
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.
Ah, one of my top complaints about digital communication. Doesn’t matter if it’s SMS or email, someone plainly doesn’t read the entirety of what you wrote even if it’s relatively short. Irritatingly sometimes taking another two follow-ups regarding the exact same subject or question ending up with both parties likely getting frustrated.
Use numbering, paragraphs etc.
Its their responsibility to read shit but its yours to be clear and concise.
For me? Usually it’s because answering the first question on the list took a lot of time, research, or mental energy and I had forgotten there were other questions by the time I finally had the answer written down. Sense of accomplishment, hit send.
Step 1. Stop emailing my boss.
Step 2. Recognize that if you’re thorough and verbose, people’s eyes will glaze over and they won’t actually read what you send. Conversely, if you’re concise and direct, people will complain that you’re aloof and not sharing information.
Step 3. Resign yourself to things only getting worse as you get older.
You can mitigate most of it by having extremely clear emails that are fast to read, with clearly numbered questions.
People are kind of stupid and lazy, and if there’s no immediate benefit for doing something or punishment for skipping it, they’ll do whatever’s easiest. We’re all like this to some degree, in some contexts or other.
It is a little funny to me that some people just don’t have professional standards. I would make a good faith effort to respond completely to a work email because that’s the job. But I don’t think that’s it for a lot of people.
There’s a lot of ADHD and friends in the world, and a lot of it is untreated. They’re not skipping questions out of malice. They’re probably trying their best. Still failing, but trying. That counts for something.
A lot of people also don’t read well. They won’t likely show up on a texty medium like this, but they’re out there. It may be uncomfortable and embarrassing for them to try to read your email, especially if the level of diction is high and the vocabulary extensive. Most people are emotionally kind of fragile, and won’t put up with that shame for very long. I think that’s why a lot of people want to hop on a call or have a meeting when it could’ve just been an email. They can talk fine, but communicating in written words is harder.
db2@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yes.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Take your upvote and choke on it, prick.
/s
LouSlash@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I didn’t expect !inclusiveor@lemmy.blahaj.zone followed by !angryupvote@sh.itjust.works