No Stupid Questions

Yes

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?"

It annoys the heck out of me too. Generally what I do is reply with the remaining questions they haven't answered; sometimes they get the message and answer all of them, sometimes we go round and round until I have all the answers I need.

I work in IT so for the most part, if I have 5 questions, that's because there are 5 things I need to know. And I need to know because they want me to solve their problem, so if they want to do this one question at a time that's fine, but if I start out going one at a time I get complained at for being too slow.

I've also tried everything I can think of short of being explicitly rude in my messages. Numbering them doesn't work. Bullet-points don't work. One question per paragraph doesn't work. Asking them explicitly to answer all questions doesn't work (how did these people ever pass an exam?).

(And yes I'm aware I haven't answered all your questions (-: )

My rule is more than 2 questions and it's a phone call.

Because people choose the easiest question to answer. You can't change people, but you can change how you communicate.

In the US it's probably because literacy and reading comprehension is the lowest it's been since the 80s.

It's a mixture of stupidity and laziness.

Ah, one of my top complaints about digital communication. Doesn’t matter if it’s SMS or email, someone plainly doesn’t read the entirety of what you wrote even if it’s relatively short. Irritatingly sometimes taking another two follow-ups regarding the exact same subject or question ending up with both parties likely getting frustrated.

The human brain processes information by chunking - bundling up information into chunks to remember it. It's like a .zip file or compression on an image. That process is a bit lossy. If you've ever tried to write a technical document or a rules-set for a game, and had a user go through the document undirected, you'll see it in action.

The more complicated, technical, or tedious the instructions are, the more likely loss or misinterpretation will occur. A friend of mine says that writing a technical document is like programming a computer that skips every 7th line.

As a person who has written many of these, I've found ways to counteract / ameliorate their problems:

• the use of paragraphing important points that you want feedback on
• When sending to multiple people, but wanting feedback from a specific person, I bold, underline, and color their name next to their action item, so they know it's for them
• Using checklists or bullet points
• explaining things through multiple avenues, like with visual images and with text simultaneously

I hope this helps!

As others have suggested, in order to communicate effectively, you have to tailor your message to your audience. Dumb it down, break it down, shorten it, order questions from most to least important or most to least relevant to the recipient, or just badger them relentlessly with follow ups until you have the information you need and talk shit about them behind their back to any competent coworkers you have.

Regardless, they're not going to just magically change, so it's up to you to do something different if you want a different result than you're getting now.

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 mitigate most of it by having extremely clear emails that are fast to read, with clearly numbered questions.

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.

You are wrong. People do not insist. People are free to do.

For example, if I know the answer to question #2 then I can give this answer and why shouldn't I?

And I feel free to remain silent where I don't know things, or to forget that there have been more questions, or I don't have the time, or whatever...

Bad reading comprehension

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.

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?

They are either distracted or don't understand that there are multiple questions. In a few cases they don't want or know how to respond to multiple questions in an email format because they are afraid of changing your text formatting (yes, at least three people have told me that was why they didn't).

Do people just not read?

Quite a few have terrible reading comprehension.

Are people that lazy?

Some are.

What is going on?

It is a mix of a lot of things, all of which are different versions of poor communication skills.

Yes they are that lazy. The average office worker also has the attention span of a gnat. Write shorter emails with fewer questions if you can.

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

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

Conciseness and directness help.

As an example, there was someone I worked with that tended to ask around a question.

"What do you know about x? What do you know about y? What do you know about z?"

Instead of "How do I get from x to z?"

I think they just want to understand the underlying process. And I can understand that. But I wasn't their mentor and it was at times frustrating.

Not suggesting OP is doing this. Just a general thought I had in regards to the question.

Yeah this drives me crazy. It's to the point where I have to drip feed my questions one after the other sometimes. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻