[OT] Multiple questions in an email
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). 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. 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
Re: [OT] Multiple questions in an email
You mean that's not the norm? :) Requirements docs are like bigfoot. You are assured it exists but when you see it, you are disappointed to find it is little more than just do it. Plus its wearing a digital watch. David If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... checkmate! -Zapp Brannigan, Futurama On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 09:56, Jonathan Parker jonathanparkerem...@gmail.com wrote: The problem with using emails as requirements documents... Q: Where are the requirements for the cruise control software? A: I'll forward you the email trail of the discussions I had with Toyota. a year or so goes by Q: Don't you know the cruise control should disengage when you brake? A: Sorry I didn't read that part of the email. On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 9:35 AM, Arjang Assadi arjang.ass...@gmail.com wrote: People don't read more than the first 2 lines of emails. For example I stopped reading after I'll generalise :) Regards Arjang
Re: [OT] Multiple questions in an email
I agree. I also think people are beginning to imagine email to be the same as things like IM, SMS, etc. Obviously it's not. I can take my original question/statement and expand it to include instructions in email. More often than not (not an exaggeration this time) people don't read my instruction properly. Even if they are bullet pointed or numbered. Considering the trend of comments in this thread, are people expecting a complex problem to be solved in two lines? Clearly not. So when you get a long email, it's long for a reason. Alternatively, perhaps failure to follow instructions is a different phenomenon. David If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... checkmate! -Zapp Brannigan, Futurama On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 13:13, silky michaelsli...@gmail.com wrote: To a significant degree I think there is no replacement for people having to learn how to communicate. It's not that hard. -- silky
