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.
Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?
I can read
S-trier trolling right here.
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
“Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?”
Not much, what is going on with you?
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.
Because people choose the easiest question to answer. You can’t change people, but you can change how you communicate.
No.
I started listing the questions as 1. 2. 3. And so on. Which helped a lot.
I hate when i do 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.
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.
I enjoy raging against it.
Good point, I rant about winter all the time.
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
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.
They probably didn’t link 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.
That rule exists because reddit wanted you to pay them ads. It doesn’t make sense in Lemmy.
Also to prevent people from answering with little more than a link.
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.
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
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=buhe.vscode-mail
Unfortunately 3 years out of date.
If you’ve got questions, put them in bullet points.
I’m not scanning a wall of text to find everything.
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🎶
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.
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.
Welcome to the workforce! (I’m assuming you’re new…)
No, just very stubborn
It’s not simply a reading comprehension thing with bullet points. If your questions require research on my end having them already structured in bullets does a few things to help with that process.
The asker’s bullet structure gives something to mimic. You can even put your answers directly below the question, so the asker can be reminded of their own questions.
The bullets also help skimming, if I need to see which item id is needed next it’s easier to do so without losing my place.
Bullet grammar structure also allows for much terser sentences. If I need to reread your question it’s easier if I don’t have to ignore a bunch of words that don’t substantively alter the meaning.
Do I need any of these? No. Could I put the questions into bullets myself for the reply? Sure. But it’s easier to spend more time and effort on answering your questions if you save me a few steps.
Sure, depending on the issue. But the main issue is that some people actually DO need those, and for those people, it’s absolutely a reading comprehension thing (which could have roots in being overworked, not caring, low attention span, poor schooling, any number of things, but the end result is poor reading comprehension).
I should not have to read emails as if they’re written by 12 years old either.
Agreed, and also a non sequitur?
Not non sequitur - Chiasmus
Yeah I had to look them up.
If you don’t care enough about the topic to take a few seconds to proofread and format your questions why would I care to decipher them? 12 year olds learn that taking the time to write a first and second draft will improve the final product.
Definitely some acceptable variation between informal chats and emails being sent to whole teams so know your audience.
Who said anything about not proofreading? My emails are perfectly legible and written in proper English. You’re equating “lack of dumbed-down easy to digest bullet points” with “sloppy, error-filled writing”. They’re two extremely different things.
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.
If you put it in red, loads of people will read it in black. Dont use html.
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.
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
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.
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.
