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.
You can mitigate most of it by having extremely clear emails that are fast to read, with clearly numbered questions.
Eh, still about 50-50 with these people. I’ve sent an email with 4 nicely formatted and numbered questions and had them respond only to question 3. Like… You read some of it, decided to answer one, and then give up with no other acknowledgement? Shit is wild.
Yes
Yesn’t
I’ve been reading the responses and it reminded me of the class I took called Business Communications, where they emphasized that CYA style communication was absolute nonsense, your responsibility when communicating is to convey information in a way that can be received, and if that doesn’t happen it’s your fault, not the recipient’s, you can’t control them only you.
So if this is just one person who misses all the questions, sure, it’s them, but you still need to figure out how to get your answers. If it’s everyone, it’s you. Maybe these questions aren’t amenable to email, maybe it’s your format, if you want answers (and not just to prove you asked in some sort of gotcha game) you need to ask the people who aren’t answering why they aren’t.
Everywhere I’ve worked, people answer these by choosing a different font color and writing answers back in the email, but there are not a lot of questions by email. Maybe a note to “provide answers in BLUE” with the word blue in blue font would help?
Put the questions in bullet points so they’re easily visible. If it’s part of a paragraph, it’s getting lost.
People can’t be bothered to read or do shit because their comprehension is trash. This happens constantly. I taught college courses for years and it was pulling fucking teeth to get people to answer essay prompts. For example:
In One Hundred Years of Solitude we see generational cycles of behavior blah blah blah, which characters fit this pattern, which characters do not, and why?
95% of answers: only characters that fit the pattern. They read the first few words and ignored everything else, and then have the audacity to complain that I said they only answered half the question.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude we see generational cycles of behavior blah blah blah, which characters fit this pattern, which characters do not, and why?
Proceeds to write an essay about Goku.
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 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.
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 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.
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 input)))Method chaining ftw Input.then().doThis().lastly()
Also it formats better.
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
try numbering them
OK, there are thousands, possibly millions of people who do this.
Reluctant upvote
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.
Why are you sending an email with multiple questions? If you have more than one question, it merits a phone call. Nobody has the time to answer all of your questions via email all day every day.
I personally receive over 200 business emails a day. Can you imagine what it would be like to answer multiple questions from each one?
If you have more than 1 question, call. Don’t wanna call? Then it’s not that important.
So when I’m writing to tech support (and they DO NOT offer phone support) exactly how do you suggest i call them?
I put in the two or three questions to save time. They can learn to read or get out of the business. There is a reason I put the questions in one email so they can read all three and get the answers back to each of the questions. If the three questions are related to each other show me the problem. This is especially important if the three questions are either related to each other, or contingent on each other.
This is an absolutely insane take. The documentation that emails provide cover everyone’s ass.
You answer multiple questions from 200 phone calls every day?
Maybe that works for internal and business communications, but if it is communication externally with clients there are a lot of people that just don’t answer their phone. Sometimes it is important stuff, and sometimes there are followup questions.
“XYZ is no longer available. Would you like ABC instead?
How many of ABC would you like?”Some people dont use phones for security reasons, and its also good to have things in writing.
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.
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
Yes they are that lazy. The average office worker also has the attention span of a gnat. Write shorter emails with fewer questions if you can.
Bad 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.
I recently emailed my professor about a question on a take home test. I asked for clarification because the wording was weird. I also asked how I should format the answer, and where in the textbook I can find info relating to it. His email back to me just said “the answer is on page 75”. It was not.
That’s what you get for not buying the very latest edition of the textbook. /s
Seriously though, you’re clearly trying to actually comprehend the material, but even the professor was too checked out? I wish I were surprised, but that’s just upsetting. Nobody takes responsibility for education anymore, not the instructors, not the administration, and none but maybe a handful of students who get zero support from either of the above. I’ve learned more from reading on the internet for free than I have from any classroom. But learning for free on one’s own doesn’t give someone a fancy paper that attracts employers. Gotta spend money to make money, yet again.
