I’ve pointed out that people don’t read the emails they’re replying to… and here is one more common manifestation of this: when you send someone an email asking two or three questions, you can be almost certain the reply will only address the first one. The recipient reads your mail, hits a question, responds to it and moves to another message. Then you need to write them another message to get the other items addressed (and create more overload for both parties).

This being the universal case, there are steps you can take to defend against this tendency (besides sending each query in a separate email, which is the common and failsafe solution but exacerbates the IO problem).

• You can give the message a subject line like “THREE questions for you”.
• You can start the message with a statement of the number of queries.
• You can put each question in a separate paragraph, prefixed with “Question 1”, “Question 2”, etc.
• You can do all of the above.

Of course, you can do none of these and hope for the best… but I wouldn’t advise it!