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.
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.
I don’t need to answer all questions that every human shoves at me. Seems like a polarizing take from the comments. I receive questions to my department that are intended for eight other departments to answer. I don’t portray myself as the encyclopedia for anyone who has my email inbox.
Didn’t know all my old coworkers were on Lemmy lol
If you want me to help you you sure as fuck do. Otherwise figure it out on your own.
Email 1 - 32 words, 3 questions
Email reply - 1 word, zero context, zero answers
Email 2 - *I don’t reply back, youre on your own.
Aight
Ah, to be 6 years old again.
I haven’t done it very often, but the few times I haven’t answered all off the questions in an email has been because some of the questions are a waste of time. I had an engineer recently ask me if I could move the location of where I was running a pipe through a floor grating. Changing the location would have changed nothing, made my job more difficult, and would have been a tripping hazard. All off this could have been avoided if they had gotten or from behind their desk and just gone and looked at what I was working on in person. I ignored their question and sent more pictures of the area. They finally said that I was good to proceed with my original plan.
“can’t change it, I can show you why in person if you come over real quick”
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, … ?
Everyone should be required to take Plain Language writing courses.
There’s a lot of factors at play as to why more people prefer it now, but who cares really. Writing in plain language makes it accessible for everyone and doesn’t hurt anyone.
Schools (both K-12 and university) keep loosening their expectations of students, and now we have kids starting college with 6th grade reading levels.
School administrators don’t want their graduation stats to look bad, and universities don’t want to lose $$ by flunking students out, so there’s a massive conflict of interest that is ultimately resulting in a disservice to students and society at large.
The other day, I saw this 8th grade graduation exam from a county in Kentucky in 1912, and it drives home how much things have changed:
That might explain younger workers, but those in their 50s and above are just as bad.
…but some things don’t. “Locate Servia on a map?”
They can’t even blame that on autocorrect; obviously the text was originally written on a qwerty keyboard though.
Just as a point of reference, my 8th grade tests were harder than that one (in Canada).
In 1912, “Servia” was the accepted English spelling. British journalists started using “Serbia” around 1914.
What is a Personal Pronoun?
A whole bunch of angry Americans would fail to answer that question correctly these days…
I’m sorry but what the fuck is number 2 under arithmetic?
I don’t disagree it’s a focus thing for many people. I’m often stunned at the lack of comprehension or attention to detail using any medium, even in person (also technical field).
Like look, I just said to do what you’re asking would require 250 firewall rules…why are you now talking as if firewall rules aren’t required? I even went through the simplest math out loud during this meeting, so everyone would understand how I came up with that number and didn’t just pull it out of my ass.
People pay attention to what they want to pay attention to (or as my grandfather would say - people hear what they want to hear). If those questions aren’t a high priority for their own work, they simply don’t see them.
For OP: email is a terrible medium for such things, unless there’s been a conversation about it, and this is part of moving a project forward. Anything out of left field isn’t important to your audience, and… people dislike comitting to anything in email. As you work with people up the food chain, you’ll find less and less happens via verifiable comms like email (which is archived).
Cause frankly, your email is the 235th most important thing on my desk 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.
Put the questions in bullet points so they’re easily visible. If it’s part of a paragraph, it’s getting lost.
If you’ve got questions, put them in bullet points.
I’m not scanning a wall of text to find everything.
Yep that’s fine push to production by Friday plz.
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.
You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.
-
Question 1
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Question 2
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Question 3
Agreed, especially if you’re writing to someone who’s not completely fluent in the language. Also use short sentences and common vocabulary.
this is the way. if you really want the highest chance of all questions being answered, number them.
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
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.
I’ll do this and they STILL only answer the first question
“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.
Reply:
One down, two to go!
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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.
ADHD
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.
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.
