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Comment by janwillemb | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this too in emails to coworkers. If the email is long enough, they just skip it to "read it later". This is quite frustrating, because sometimes you just _have_ to communicate some more words.

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One of my managers gave me some guidelines here. If it's more than 100 words, cap it at 100 and schedule a meeting. It clearly is information-dense to the degree where a quick question/answer session will be helpful.

From my own experience, I make sure to never ask more than one question in an email. If you ask more, people will answer the first and ignore the rest.

I still find it useful to write those emails, even if I'm asking to talk to someone. The email serves as an agenda, it forces me to reason through the issue, and it serves as a long-term record of the issue. But the request for the meeting should come first.

I find reading the emails preferential to a meeting myself, but I guess a meeting is sometimes the only way to get people to pay attention.

It depends on the context, the workplace, and how you do it.

An agenda is an agenda, which is different than an argument/position that would be in an email. Usually when I get something like that, it's intended to be an "anchor" or written record of something that the other party wants. That triggers more bullshit email, as now a more formal artifact of whatever conversation happens in the meeting is needed.

I had a colleague who never could get our customers to sign off any solutions he suggested. The problem was that he wrote essays comparing the pro and cons of different solutions and asked them to chose one. He rarely even got an answer.

When I took over, we decided what we thought was the best solution. Explained it in an email with max three lines and asked if we should continue with that solution. I usually got an OK within minutes.

And you are right, the long essays are put in the "read later" pile, and in our case, the customers just never got around to them.

Long emails should still have short opening paragraphs. No more than three sentences, one or two preferred. Basic context ("We still need to figure out waffles"), people's names if it's a referral or a request for someone else ("Jane said you know waffle batter the best"), and most importantly, if you're asking a question, end with a question mark ("What waffle batter recipe should we use?").

The rest of the email can then be long, but at the end, always restate the question.

That’s called BLUF. Bottom line up front.

Or TLDR:)

I think this also applies to any document/article/text that is mainly there to convey information.

People will skim through it quickly to extract relevant facts of interest. The longer the text, the harder this is and the less likely someone will do it.

In English we call it "Wall of Text" in German sometimes "Bleiwüste"[0].

Things that help:

- using bullet points

- simple, clear language

- a concise abstract/tldr

- interactive elements when possible such as links and expandable elements:

In HTML there is a standard element that is seldomly used but to me seems very useful: the <details>/<summary> element[1].

I think it should be used more often! Perhaps in combination with a more distinct color/styling too.

Here is an interesting tutorial/article that uses it[2]. You can expand text to get more background information and explanations on certain topics.

This practice condenses the text, making it less daunting at a first glance and also makes a clear distinction between core content and supplementary information, which increases the overall structure.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleiw%C3%BCste

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...

[2] https://x775.net/2019/03/18/Introduction-to-Datalog.htm2

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