E-Mailing Questions

I’m home for lunch, so a little lunchtime blogging. A reader writes:

Just a logistics question. I’m assuming that you probably don’t have time to answer all faith/church questions that you receive. But is there a "normal" amount of time that it takes you to respond to the ones you do answer?

I’m afraid that there’s not fixed answer to this, but I can describe what tends to happen:

People send queries, links, etc., to my gmail account, and I at least look at all of them. The great majority I read in detail, though in the case of some unusually lengthy ones I’m afraid that I can’t do more than skim them.

Many of these I intend to answer but don’t have the time to answer at the moment. As a result, they start moving down the stack in my inbox. The ones that tend to get answered tend to have one or more of the following characteristics:

1. They are short. The shorter the query is, the easier it is for me to answer it. If someone has sent a query that is several screens long, the odds of it getting answered are much, much lower than if it is only two sentences long. The shorter one can make the query, the more extraneous background one can cut out of it, the greater the odds of it being answered.
2. They don’t require me to look something up. The more likely it is that I’ll have to go do a bunch of research, the less likely it is that I’ll be able to respond. I know that there’s no reliable way for correspondents to know that I’ll have to research vs. what I won’t, but some kinds of queries are more likely than others to trigger the need for research. E.g., "What do you think about the personal scandals surrounding this particular pope in the tenth century?" and "What are the laws regarding hounds in the midsouth states of the U.S.?" and "What do the sheriff’s records in Amarillo, Texas have to say about Alberto Rivera?" are ones almost guaranteed to require research. (These are all variants on questions I have actually received.)
3. They don’t require me to write a huge, complex answer. Since I’m doing my responses in the evening, after I’ve gotten home from work, I’m likely to be tired or wanting to veg out. The more time and energy a reply would take, the less likely it is that I’ll be able to provide one.
4. They are on only one point. The more points that an e-mail tries to take on, the lower the chance of it getting answered. The reason is that adding more points (a) lengthens the email and (b) ups the chances of me having to look something up and (c) lengthens the response I’d have to write. A corrollary here is that it’s easier to get answers to multiple questions on different subjects if you ask them one at a time rather than combining them in a single email.
5. The don’t deal with questions that I’ve answered repeatedly. I actually cut quite a bit of slack in this area, but it won’t be interesting to the readers if I simply answer variants on "Can I attend this wedding?" and "Is an annulment needed here?" I feel a bit of a Catch-22, because these questions are important for pastoral reasons, but they are the current equivalent of "Did Jesus have brothers?" (the question that was asked Every Single Show back in the early days of Catholic Answers Live). Recently I received a question of this nature that was simple enough that I was tempted to post it and let the regular readers answer it in the combox.
6. They are questions of special pastoral importance. For obvious reasons, I try to answer these. This is also the reason I answer as many marriage-related questions as I do.
7. They are recently-received. When I’m looking for questions to answer on the blog, it’s just easier to go to the top of the stack than to root around further down in the inbox. A corrollary is that if it’s been a while since you asked your question and it hasn’t been answered, you may want to re-send it. Just bear in mind the following point. . . .
8. They are polite. Questions of an insulting or rude nature are less likely to be answered. People who write in only to tell me that I’m an idiot (and there are many such people), of course, get no response. If they tell me I’m an idiot as a prelude to asking a question, they are very unlikely to get a response. If they say "How dare you not answer my question, you cussed so-and-so!" they also are less likely to meet with a favorable response. After all, nobody is paying me to do this. I’m spending my own time and money to provide this service, and I simply can’t promise a response to every query. (At times the situation brings to mind the 285th Rule of Acquisition).

I also should mention one other matter. Folks reading the blog don’t see the responses I send back privately. This is something I do for particularly delicate situations. Sometimes I privately address some really amazing situations that are simply too sensitive to go into on the blog. While this is something that I do in exceptional circumstances, the limits on my time are such that if I at all can, I prefer to answer the questions on the blog itself.

I take pains to mask the identities of the people writing in. I even edit the e-mails they send to remove or fuzz over potentially revealing pieces of information (e.g., what year people got married, what churches they were members of, the precise number of kids they have, how old someone is). This lets me answer some otherwise delicate questions in a way that (a) respects the privacy of the individuals involved, (b) will benefit those in the audience who may be in similar situations, and (c) allows me to get a blog post done.

I say that to point out that individuals who write should in the main expect their queries to be dealt with here on the blog rather than by private e-mail, though in exceptional cases the reverse is what happens.

So. . . . I’m sure that’s both more and less info than the reader wanted, but I hope it provides a better feel for how email queries get handled and how to maximize the chances of having them answered.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin