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.
LOL, literally happened to me this morning, except my tormentor said “nope.”
I’ll harass him about it next week
I was taught in college to only include a single question in one email unless you can’t get around it, because many people will only see the first one.
Yeah this drives me crazy. It’s to the point where I have to drip feed my questions one after the other sometimes. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Because, after three words, you owe me $50 an hour for my attention. $100/second if you want me to answer questions. And if you’re not even willing to consider any of that, go and absolutely fuck yourself for wasting my fucking time. You have guaranteed that I will respond in an even more hostile manner for every inevitable time pieces of shit like you demand that I do free work for you.
Eat shit and die!
Do you…need a hug?
Mod removed before I could ask the same
It’s funny that some replies are saying your post itself is too wordy or long. People just can’t focus on anything anymore. As for the suggestion of bullet points, I’ve had people reply a single answer to an email that just had three short bullet points. So no, it’s not always because the questions are buried in text, it’s because people react to the first thing they see and don’t finish reading.
A lot of it is laziness but on the other hand my boss will often cc me on irrelevant emails, rather infamously sometimes forward an entire 20 responses email chain and tell you to read it, and send 8 paragraphs of questions with only one related to me. Frankly, it is overwhelming and a waste of time. I’ve started not responding and my productivity and mental health have improved.
Emails and texts need to be succinct. The higher up the chain you go the more true this is. The higher up the chain the more emails you get think 200+. If someone writes a paragraph you’re skimming for relevance generally.
Tldr; professional communication does not need length. Justify your questions separately from actual bulleted or numbered questions.
The question they are answering is the first one they read.
(/s)
As others have suggested, in order to communicate effectively, you have to tailor your message to your audience. Dumb it down, break it down, shorten it, order questions from most to least important or most to least relevant to the recipient, or just badger them relentlessly with follow ups until you have the information you need and talk shit about them behind their back to any competent coworkers you have.
Regardless, they’re not going to just magically change, so it’s up to you to do something different if you want a different result than you’re getting now.
Sounds like your emails are too long. Trim it to the minimum amount of words to get your point across and be professional, and put all questions in a numbered list.
- a single answer fits all the questions asked
- answering one question will make the others irrelevant.
- didn’t realize there are multiple questions (usually down to formatting, or skimming a block of text)
- the person’s just in a hurry, at least answering one is better than ignoring entirely
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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’.
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?
-
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!
My rule is more than 2 questions and it’s a phone call.
If it’s more than 2 questions, I want it all in writing
That’s why you have the phone call, to discuss it, and in closing state you’ll send an email.
If it’s more than 1.1 questions, I want it all in writing
You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.
-
Question 1
-
Question 2
-
Question 3
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
Agreed, especially if you’re writing to someone who’s not completely fluent in the language. Also use short sentences and common vocabulary.
I’ll do this and they STILL only answer the first question
Reply:
One down, two to go!
“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.
Send separate emails. Schedule them 15 minutes apart.
No. This is not the way and will get you even less answers.
This gets you “oh, I never got that email. It probably got blocked by the spam filter.”
Yep exactly. It pisses people off.
This is so extra when motherfuckers could just read.
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.
this is the way. if you really want the highest chance of all questions being answered, number them.
-
Cause frankly, your email is the 235th most important thing I’m facing 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.
