Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?

I can read

"Do people just not read? Are people that lazy? What is going on?"

Not much, what is going on with you?

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.

Been doing email since it began. Same frustrations.

Solutions (workarounds):

1. Email is structured with "executive summary" & "detail". That way I can write all the words I want but people can only read the first paragraph.
2. Never ask questions. Tell them what I'm going to choose, & give them opportunity to disagree. That way if they don't respond usefully I can take their "non-response" as a response & proceed anyway.
3. If I need to ask a question, use a phone call or go to their desk, or (shudder) make a meeting.

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

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

No.

I started listing the questions as 1. 2. 3. And so on. Which helped a lot.

It's not that they "insist" on not answering, they just have limited reading comprehension and/or attention span. With experience you learn to ask exactly one question in an email, and maybe you'll get an answer some of the time, and if you're lucky it will be coherent.

I KNOW THIS ONE AND THE ANSWER IS : IT"S MICROSOFT'S FAULT.

Back in the day when Email first became popular, it was normal and accepted use to do "in-line-quoting". You would hit "reply" and get the text of the original mail with a quote character, mostly ">" in the begining of the line. Then you would put some empty lines at the point where you wanted to answer/comment and type your reply in the middle of the email you received, easily giving context to your words, and making it obvious to what this comment relates, while also showing which part was by the sender and which by you (due to the quotation symbols)

This was a very good system, and then came MICROSOFT OUTLOOK

and they defaulted to giving you a empty page when clicking reply and just dumping the whole mail you replied to somewhere below, out of sight.

everyone using Outlook started "top-posting" to the annoyance of every intelligent being in the galaxy, but because Outlook was the first email experience many people had, the culture of in-line-quoting was destroyed by the unwashed microsoft masses.

fast-forward to today, where a young person (that is below 50) posts about a topic just to vent, and a old person (over 9000) replies with a sincere history lessen from a time where even email were better.

yours truely,

someone who is still salty about that and just decided to make a youtube rant about it.

Yes.

Considering your wording in the last paragraph, I'm going to guess that your writing style is frequently overwhelming. Making sure that questions are clearly isolated (I'd suggest using numeric lists or bullet points) makes it clear what response you're expecting.

Additionally, if you're asking several difficult questions, it's likely that people will lose the thread partway through.

Poor reading comprehension skills are more prevalent than we think

How are the questions formatted?

If you've got questions, put them in bullet points.

I'm not scanning a wall of text to find everything.

People are lazy, they get so many emails each day, they couldn’t be bothered reading messages properly. I have turned into a cynical annoying person and write emails with large clear action points like this:

Hi, I have some comments and questions.

Please answer 2 (two) questions so that I can proceed with my part of this work. Without an answer to both, no more work will be done and the project will be on hold.

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1. Yes or no- Does this mean that the flibbertygibbet must be completed first?

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2. You need to provide further information on the doohickey because there is not enough detail for me to be able to goober the whatchamacallit

And then keep forwarding the original email every day until I get the required information. When the boss asks why no progress has been made, I can show him the email trail asking for information.

Cover your ass, keep asking the same questions until you get an answer.

You can get mad at everyone else or you can start playing to the lowest common denominator.

1. Question 1

2. Question 2

3. Question 3

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!?

People read the subject line, assuming it's not longer than about seven words, and then the first 30%, and last 15% of your email, in my experience. You can increase this by adding line breaks and bullets. In my experience, the best responses come from a short paragraph, followed by a couple bullet points, then a couple sentences, then your salutation/signature. I try not to write anything longer than that.

try numbering them

Human communication isn't perfect. Some people have too many emails. Others need cues only audio visual interaction can provide to quickly parse info.

Use numbering, paragraphs etc.

Its their responsibility to read shit but its yours to be clear and concise.