I tend to answer them all, but I’m weird that way

I’m not sure. Maybe. Sometimes. I don’t know.

I can only tell you that my best results have come from replying with a neutral “Thank you”, then repeating the questions. I prefer it when they answer all my questions, but ultimately, if I want answers, I need to persist, and so I do.

In email, I always make my questions the last thing right before my signature as a call to action. I think many people skip reading the entire email, but may read the line above the signature if they see a question mark. You always want the last thing they read to be the idea they have to act on THIS part.

• Phrase your questions unambiguously
• Bonus points for phrasing them with a binary response: “Do you want A or B?” or “Do you approve that we can move forward with the plan as stated here?”
• Only ask the questions you REALLY need an answer to. Every next question risks losing a answer you really need.
• Make self liquidating statements instead of questions “If you want a different path let me know. Unless I from you by the next Tuesday, I’m moving forward with what I described in this email”

If you write open ended or ambiguous questions you risk your audience having to take time to think about a response and they get distracted. Risky questions in this area are: “So what do you want to do here?” or “What do you think?”

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, … ?

Cause frankly, your email is the 235th most important thing on my desk today.

Put the questions in bullet points so they’re easily visible. If it’s part of a paragraph, it’s getting lost.

Yes.

If you’ve got questions, put them in bullet points.

I’m not scanning a wall of text to find everything.

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.

You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.

1. Question 1

2. Question 2

3. Question 3

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.

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.

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 have the same question, as I will receive replies through text messages that are like this:

Me: hey! Are we still meeting today? Where would be good for you? I’m open from 10am until 6pm so just let me know when works best.

Them: I can still meet today

I get responses like this all the time, and I don’t feel like my initial text is too much.

Bad reading comprehension