This issue is the flip side of something I wrote about earlier when I suggested that you Keep to One Subject Per Email. The point that I made there is that many recipients just don’t take the time to carefully read all of a message before they hit “reply” and start writing their response to you. They’re in such a hurry to get another message out of their inbox that they answer one of your questions but don’t notice that there is a second one. Or they assume that they get the gist of your message from reading the first sentence or two and ask you a cranky question that’s answered in your third.
Just as it’s your responsibility as a writer to construct clear and efficient messages, it’s also your responsibility as a reader to read the entire text of an email and make sure you understand it as best you can instead of firing off a response that’s based on a cursory reading of the first few words. It’s important to remember that while you and I might be trying to be good citizens of the email ecosystem, limiting ourselves to one topic per message and putting the most important information at the beginning of our email, not everyone else is as thoughtful or has our good training. You may work with someone, even your boss, who still subscribes to the “murder mystery” school of writing and likes to save all of the most important stuff for the last line of her messages. Ta-Dah! Help her—and help yourself—by making sure that you understand everything she has to say as well as you can before making a decision or responding. You’re never going to understand everything perfectly (bad writing creates all kinds of mysteries and confusion), but it’s worth the effort. Why bother? As usual, because you don’t want to look stupid—and being a bad reader can make you look stupid just as easily as being a bad writer.
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