zlacker

>>tagoll+(OP)
Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following.

* Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey.

* Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graphic design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).

* Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.

* If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.

This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.

>>logica+ac
How much do you want to bet most people will read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance?

Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.

>>mcguir+2p
It's easier to consider this question with empathy: imagine times where you replied to emails partially, answering some (one), but not all questions. Ask yourself why you did a partial reply. Then, when you ask questions of others, apply those learnings.

For me, I tend to 'jump' to the first answer that comes to mind, without reading the full nuance, likely because I'm optimizing at replying sooner, so I can move onto the next task, because I have many tasks I need to do. I quickly pattern match and move on.

>>889135+SE

    imagine times where you replied to emails partially

It will be hard for someone that always replies to the first thing only to empathize with this but: This has literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied partially to something in an email. You will get an answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the answer you were looking for but I will answer each and every one, even if it's just a "I will have to look into this one and get back to you" so that the other 6 items can get answered right away.

Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?

>>tharku+VI
I don't think this is practically much different then answering one thing. If you give one answer and 3 "I'll get back to you on that"'s-- this creates a promise of a future asynchronous answer, which is only as good as your word. People often have too many tasks, so to get those remaining items on your queue, they'll have to ask you again.

As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the future promise of an answer with no SLA.

>>889135+vL
I would be to differ. To me, there is a large difference between just ignoring 6 out of 7 questions I asked you or you telling me that you do not know the answer right now but will get back to me.

I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no implicit SLA given the relationship history between the two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is practically the same.

I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not perfect.

Since this was an example answer only, it is also possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any reasonable amount of time at this point because of other priorities I have and that you should find someone else or I might point you towards someone else. In any case, you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just ignore them.