Estimates of the literacy level of the adult population are doubtless wildly over-estimated. There's a reason that newspapers are targeted at a seventh-grade reading level, or at least used to be.

Writing skills are even more depressing. Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

I feel like a relatively intelligent person but I absolutely struggle with writing concise emails / docs that are well organized. It's an agonizing process and I feel my results are hit or miss with little inbetween.

Was it Samuel Johnson who wrote "I would write a shorter letter but I don't have time" or something along those lines

Writing good documentation takes time! There's no way around it other than practice.

> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

To be fair, that's not my forte either as my writing tends to be sort-of meandering at times. Just recently I wrote a longer message to my PM and he told me "yo, bullet points please".

The literacy and writing of my colleagues has always been good, but sometimes it's in a different language, and their English literacy and writing are not as good.

There's definitely a problem there in that we often assume that "fluent in English" means "mastery of the language", but these two are different things.

I'm often firmly in the "this meeting could have been an E-mail" camp, and have sadly sat through my share of those. Unfortunately, often the reason this meeting isn't an E-mail is because the people who need to know and need to act don't read their damn E-mail. Or they don't read it completely, or they read it and don't comprehend it, or they read it but don't take the needed action, or for lots of other reasons. I'd love to treat people like grown-ups and reap the benefits of purely asynchronous office communication, but it's so rare that this happens.

My method now is as follows:

1. Send the E-mail asking for whatever, and an expected time frame

2. If I don't get the requested reply or action in the time frame, gently ping with a chat message

3. If still nothing... Well, here we go: it's meeting time, regrettably

> don't read their damn E-mail

I also never fully understood this problem, but the other day, someone shared their screen and I saw, I kid you not, 5000+ unread emails. Granted, these were both private and work emails, but still.

I think when something like that happens (and I don't think it's an isolated case), we've completely lost the ability to deal with email in any sort of non-random way. There's a couple of questions I would ask myself there:

- Why am I being CC'd on so many things? (unfortunately, this can often be outside of one's control)

- Why don't I use automatic filtering and tagging?

- Why don't I unsubscribe from marketing emails?

- etc.