“I Owe the Sender a Response” Is a Fallacy

As the writer of a sarcastic five-paragraph essay on five-sentence emails, you might think that I saw Mike Davidson’s announcement of sentenc.es and had a response to the idea. Davidson’s argument is that “the time commitment difference between sender and receiver is huge … the sender will ask two or three open-ended one sentence questions which elicit multi-paragraph answers.” I have a simple, two-fold response. First: if the sender deserves a response, ask questions in return that refine the open-ended initial inquiry—force this to be a conversation and not an opportunity for you to spend a half-hour answering what is, likely, a half-formed question anyway. Second: not every email deserves a response.


Q: Why is this entry exactly five sentences?
A: http://geof.is.a.sarcastic.asshole.gfmorris.net/

Posted July 19th, 2007 in Geekery, Rants by Geof F. Morris.

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  1. Chris Hubbs:

    You get a hearty Huzzah! from me for both your tenets. I have a frequent emailer here at work who is notorious for ambiguous one-line email questions that very rarely make sense. I know he does need good answers, so I have to force myself to respond with appropriate questions rather than just the one sentence responses that are so tempting. :-)

  2. Around the web | alexking.org:

    [...] ‘I Owe the Sender a Response’ Is a Fallacy – I think Geof knew I’d link to this. [...]

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