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Comment by nnf | Hacker News Reader

Another tip I use a lot: ask just one question per email.

This seems inefficient, and it is, but there's a subset of people with whom I communicate in my industry, and they almost always will only answer one of my questions if I put multiple questions in an email. Even a simple one like:

> Two quick questions for you:

> 1. Do you want this or that?

> 2. Which do you like better, A or B?

Limiting to a single question and then following up with a second question takes longer, but I don't feel rude having to point out the second question that was missed/ignored from my initial email.

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I use this tip as well. People don't read... until they do.

This is a bit of a tangent...

My incident reports are a good example of the reverse: giving good answers.

* The first two sentences will explain what happened, the scope of impact, when it was fixed, and a plan of action.

* The next paragraph or two has the important details.

* Everything after is a detailed timeline (down to the minute if that information is available.)

This allows anyone reading the email to read as much as they want without having to read everything.

Effective communication is hard.

I once saw a big company internal webapp that did a dangerous thing. Once it had been misused and the app team was blamed, so there were a bunch of checkboxes at the bottom, including one that said something like "I didn't read this I'm just checking all the boxes and clicking go" and if you clicked that box it would give you an error message.

I've also found that in emails there's a surprisingly large number of people that think "yes" is a valid response to: "Should I do A or B"? They interpret the or like an interpreter and short circuit at A, rather than recognizing that this is asking which should be done.

"Should I do A?, or B?"

I mention the number of questions in a sentence like "I have following 3 questions:" and then write them down as a numbered list. I think this makes it more obvious if an answer is missing. However, if an answer is missing, I just ask that question again (maybe rephrased), without pointing out that a question was missed - "It is not clear to me yet [...]"

It works at least sometimes.

the number of 2 question emails ignored infuriates me! I hate the inefficiency, but have learned to deal with it the same way. Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.

Or send them a form with a submit button that works only if both answers are filled in.

Great point. I often find myself frustrated when someone only answers one of my two (very clearly laid out) questions. Should definitely make more of a point of keeping it to one at a time.

A similar thing happens in online discussions where arguments are not uncommon.

If you argue with someone and point out all the ways in which and why they are are wrong, they are free to counteract just one of your points and maybe "strawman" it. But if you just put your single best argument forward it is much more difficult to dismiss.

So whether questions, or arguments, it best to start with just one.

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