Andrew Lark has managed to describe something that's been bugging me for a while know: the the sad state of corporate e-mail communications. He says:
The problem is that the average employee takes little time to communicate effectively. Or, they haven't developed the skills. Or, like it has for many, email has become like an arcade game in which we win by shooting the bastards down as they flood our inbox. What is said matters less than the quickness of the finger. This eventually develops into a deep form of gaming addiction in which we have to be ready 24x7 to fire!
I don't know what it is, but as the sphere of folks I routinely exchange e-mail with has grown beyond software engineers and ops/sysadmin guys, I've been increasingly frustrated by how bad it is. Some of the stuff I bitched about over tow years ago in ru stupid certainly hasn't gotten any better. But that was just scratching at the surface.
It's been too long since I ranted about something, here's a brief list of the the things that drive me nuts. It is by no means complete.
- Top posting. Outlook has done the world a huge disservice by encouraging folks to respond in summary format at the top of a message rather than using the inline responses that were common for so many years before this e-mail stuff became mainstream. The problem gets worse as threads get longer and I'm forced to read e-mail messages from bottom to top. WTF?! More about this: here, here, and here.
- Expectations about when I'll read a message. Honestly, if it's that important, why are you using e-mail? The first letter in "IM" stands for "Instant." Try that instead. And, like seemingly everyone else in the workplace, I wear a damned cell phone. When it rings, I generally answer it. The only real exceptions are when I'm in the restroom, when the caller has blocked caller ID, or when I'm in the middle of a meeting that is highly likely to be more important than your call. The more often I'm responding to your e-mail, the less work I'm probably getting done.
- Bad subject lines. You know, I thought we'd figured this out back in 1998 when Jakob Nielsen wrote Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines. You can argue with a lot of what he's said over the years, but this is one of the few things that very few people dispute. If you send me a message with a subject that I cannot figure out, I'm likely to read it after all the messages with reasonable subject lines.
- Screwed up punctuation. Question marks go at the end of questions. Always. If you omit question marks, when I'm skimming your message I may completely miss the fact that you're asking me something and file it away because it seemed informational only. And don't forget about your friend the apostrophe, otherwise known as the single quote.
- Sentences without subjects. Who was it that decided we can just stop putting subjects in our sentences? I clearly missed that memo but see it happening everywhere. For example, consider this tidbit: "Recommend not using the fuzzbot image on that frumple page." There are no less than three ways to interpret that: (1) You recommend that I don't use the image, in which case the sentence is missing an "I" at the beginning. (2) The team you're speaking on behalf of has decided to make that recommendation, in which case the sentence is missing a "We" at the beginning. (3) You are commanding me to make the recommendation, in which case the sentence is missing something like "I suggest that you" at the beginning. If you leave it up to me to figure out exactly what you mean, I'm always going to choose the one I most like.
- Broken threading. This is more a complaint about tools than anything, but some of the most popular mail software creates messages that are difficult to thread properly. Worse yet, they don't even offer a thread-based message view for their users. And the lame "group based on message subject" is not threading. Top posting doesn't help here when I'm trying to "manually" thread messages.
I really don't know what we can do about this. For some of it, I think we need better tools--much better. It's clear to me that not only to most people not "get" how e-mail quoting and threading work, they just don't care. Web-based mail services like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and GMail only serve to lower the bar further.
But some of this simply requires people to (1) care about their communication, and (2) take the time to do it well. Sadly, both of those seem to be rare.
I'm tempted to not allow comments on this post. I know it's going to mainly attract people who are looking for a good flame war. Oh, and it'll bring out a few of those who think that I'm somehow not entitled to an opinion--especially an "elitist" one.
</rant>
Posted by jzawodn at December 05, 2004 07:18 PM
I agree with you 100%. I have a lot of the same frustrations.
> Outlook has done the world a huge disservice by encouraging folks to respond in summary format at the top of a message rather than using the inline responses that were common for so many years before this e-mail stuff became mainstream.
I disagree. The correct place for a mailer to position the cursor when replying to something is at the _top_.
That way, you move down the email, snipping where appropriate, and replying to each point in turn.
If a mailer positions the cursor at the bottom, it discourages quoting in context - i.e. the user generally quotes the entire email, including completely irrelevent parts, and just replies in a big heap at the bottom. That's only a little better than top-posting.
If a user _does_ want to reply correctly, what's the first step they have to do? Move the cursor to the top of the email.
I hate the phone and IM. It allows people to dictate (more or less) when I respond to them. I'd much prefer e-mail where I can respond when I'm at a good point to do so.
That Jakob Nielsen article on headlines is the worst piece of crap I've ever read on the subject, and believe me, I've read a ton of them, taken classes on headline writing, I've even written an essay or two about the subject.
Heads and subject headers are a tool of the writer, Nielsen wants them to be a tool of the reader, so, for example, they sort properly in your mail app, for the reader's convenience. It's never going to happen.
I've rarely found any of Nielsen's suggestions to be of any practical merit. He's living in a dream world, where everyone does things exactly like he does, so nobody is ever confused. It's never going to happen. Writing is a communicative art, Nielsen drains all the life out of it and turns it into a formula.
Jim, if someone is going to properly trim and reply to an email in context, they're going to have to move the cursor up, down, and all over the place one way or another. Where the cursor is initially placed doesn't really matter very much for that person. The problem with Outlook placing it at the top is that 99% of of people don't even think about being nice and trimming and quoting properly; they just start writing and ignore everything below the cursor.
If the cursor were placed at the bottom by default (like in sane mail clients), the user is really forced to consciously do *something* with the message above it. There's at least a chance that some of them will take the hint and compose a properly trimmed and quoted reply.
Plus, while a reply at the bottom of an entire un-trimmed email can be annoying, it's still *far* less irritating to a reader (to me anyway) than top-posting.
I agree with everything you say except the top posting. If I've read the other posts in the thread, top posting allows me to see what the respondent wants to say. The quoted material, edited or not, is there for my reference in case I've not been reading the thread. Of course what we should have is a tool that allows the READER to see the latest response as a top or bottom post as THEY prefer.
Although I can see your arguments, I personally never notice a problem.
I tend to find 1-to-1 email conversation fairly short anyway (so backtracking over huge sets of quoting isn't a problem) and people generally tend to be smart enough to use a bit of decorum in mailing list situations (or else they usually get flamed in turn).
By all means, right on the ball with the "Instant" point though. Just as irritating, in my opinion, is the reverse - when people ring you to ask some silly question that they could have sent via email. I'm a bit of a Nazi on that point - unless the server is on fire, I don't want someone calling at me from the next room.
Jason:
It's the 1-to-1 stuff that's easy in my case. The group communication via e-mail is when it gets messy.
I agree with everything you say except the top posting. If I've read the other posts in the thread, top posting allows me to see what the respondent wants to say. The quoted material, edited or not, is there for my reference in case I've not been reading the thread. Of course what we should have is a tool that allows the READER to see the latest response as a top or bottom post as THEY prefer.
I'd like to recommend Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as an excellent book on communication skills - something that everyone needs, especially in hi-tech as deadlines loom and tempers flare.
NVC is about communicating at the heart level rather than the head level. I'm grateful for its insights.
Expectations about when I'll read a message. Honestly, if it's that important, why are you using e-mail? The first letter in "IM" stands for "Instant." Try that instead. And, like seemingly everyone else in the workplace, I wear a damned cell phone. When it rings, I generally answer it.
This is generally how I think, which is why I tend to ring people and so on. However, every time I do it I feel guilty, owing to people like Joel Spolsky writing about how the people you ring up are "in the zone", and if you interrupt someone then they lose fifteen minutes of productivity while they context-switch to your phone call and back again. Email avoids this. The problem with email, though, is that unless the person you are mailing is either very conscientious or not very busy, it's really easy to ignore it for longer than the sender would like. Hence emails about semi-urgent topics. I don't think anybody mails about stuff that really does need to be answered immediately, do they? Perhaps they do around you, though; I can only go on my experience...
Talking about e-mail, have mine to yours been dropping into a black hole recently? I've sent you a few and just not sure if you've got them, or just not bothered to reply to them )probably due to one of the points aboce!).
- wil
I'm with you all the way. Top posting is a horror of Room 101. I don't, despite the rage it infuses in me, ever voice it to my 'respondees' because I'm a generally tolerant guy. What really gets my wick is when they email me back and say, "WTF? I don't get where your reply is. It's hard to read with all your replies in between all my text." Argh. OK, your text is - probably - green with a gigantic flaming bar along the left side and my text is black. Call _that_ difficult? I think not.
I also must add that Mail.app is also an offender of placing the cursor at the top. I will give Apple a break however because they created the interface which I have grown to love. I truly believe that more should be done to educate the user about email, usenet and the www. Too many technophiles in the world are just ripping the box open and using all these digital gismos without learning how to use them properly first.
worse than top-posting is interleaved replies with something other than '> ' (or close equivalent) for quoted content. i cringe every time i see something like "Reply below marked with [SU]" and there's just a bunch of paragraphs, some marked with [SU] and some not.
Broken threading isn't just a problem with tools. It also happens when users start a new thread by replying to an old message and changing the subject line... or continue a thread by starting a new message (or replying to an unrelated message) and copying a previous subject line.
Both are really annoying in threaded mail readers and list archives.
I think that Apple's Mail.app attempts to do some automatic thread repair, by matching quoted text in the body with text from previous messages.
Next time you find people who need a lecture on punctuation, I recommend sending them to meet with Mr. Period!
Thanks for linking my site, I'm glad you find it a good resource. Remember if I forgot something, you can edit the page yourself to include your ideas as well.
Subject lines...
They describe the subject of the message. How hard is that?
One point in favour of top posting is for people reading their mail with a text-to-speech tool, where it is a lot more difficult to skip accurately to the latest response. This could be considered a tool issue of course.
Top posting is a horror for me working in support, people forward me a 10-mail "conversation" (top-posted of course) with a "Can you look at this?" at the top.
Uh, no?
At least provide a freaking summary.
