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?”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No.
I usually number my questions, makes it more obvious
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.
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.
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.
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
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!?
You’re right. The illiteracy is everywhere. It’s a very troubling sign.
I wonder, were there any other points in history, post-literacy, where a significant amount of people went to school yet still lacked literacy skills? If it has happened, would it even be recorded? Or is this aspect of modern society truly novel?
It’d be nice to know how such a situation would’ve been rectified in the past, but I get the feeling the solution would be the same thing I’ve been calling for since my own childhood - a comprehensive public educational system with a focus on critical thinking.
It would be interesting to see if it’s ever happened in the past, for sure. I too assumed it was due to poor education, but the three people I mentioned (my old boss and the 2 new coworkers) all came from different areas of the U.S. and are each in different generations (1 Boomer, 1 Gen X, 1 Millennial), so they all have very different backgrounds/education experiences, yet they ALL struggle to read anything longer than a single sentence. It’s infuriating. I try to be patient, because hey, we all have our thing we suck at, but it’s honestly a little scary that they and so many other are out there not following directions simply because they can’t read them.
Literacy rates in USA are pretty awful and getting worse. And probably happening in other countries as well.
It’s especially bad when you work in an experienced field where a primary job function is reading comprehension (software engineering). And you have folks who are supposed to be software engineers who can’t seem to read or understand documentation. Never mind being able to productively engage in the various forms of debate that come along with any engineering practice.
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).
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.
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.
Human communication isn’t perfect. Some people have too many emails. Others need cues only audio visual interaction can provide to quickly parse info.
Use numbering, paragraphs etc.
Its their responsibility to read shit but its yours to be clear and concise.
On average a communication has more readers than writers, so it is better for writer(s) to use effort in order to save effort on the behalf of the reader(s).
This was especially true in the days of mailing lists and me having to beat TOFU users about the head with a clue-by-4. But, it remains true today. The median communication might be 1 to 1, but it’s much more frequent for additional readers to be added that additional writers, so maximum effort with writing is still true.
But, man, it is annoys the heck out of me when I compose informative, contexual email/SMS with several open-ended questions and get back: “yes”.
Big shout out for enumerating questions. Makes it clear you need an answer for each one. Makes it easier to follow up if you need more info on a particular question. Makes it easier to pester the person with “hey, I need an answer to 2 by EOD or project deadlines will be significantly impacted” (copied to your PM).
People’s poor reading comprehension is annoying. But the right move is to do everything you can to get the answers you need, creating a polite paper trail as you go. Usually the other person will get you the info you need sooner if you pester them enough, with the implied threat that you are building a case against them if the project is delayed. Because if they don’t answer your questions in a timely fashion when you do everything possible to get the answers you need, it is their fault.
