On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 8:41 AM, David Richards <ausdot...@davidsuniverse.com> wrote: > Greetings all, > > Has anyone else noticed people often don't answer more than one > question in an email? In fact, I'll generalise that and say people > often don't read an entire email. I had this today (already) but this > happens to me "all the time" (it's probably more like 25% of the time > but I think the exaggeration is justified).
I don't notice this really, but I tend to put all items people need to respond to in a list: - like so, - and thus - etc Which generally gets the appropriate result. But I do think if the question was phrased how you've shown below, I may accidentally ignore 'C' while answering 'A'. Maybe. > This is particularly annoying when the main question isn't the first > one (such as today's incident). eg, "Please tell me A and B but I > really want to know about C" will usually just get me the answer to A. > > I don't want to have to "twitterize" my emails into single sentences > of a few small words. Sometimes, when (professional) emails I send get too long, I'll write a little "Summary" area at the bottom. It works well, because bored people just read the summary, and then decide if the entire thing is of interest. > I wonder how many people on this list didn't get past the first sentence :) > > David > > "If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes > will fall like a house of cards... checkmate!" > -Zapp Brannigan, Futurama -- silky http://www.programmingbranch.com/
