Do You Remember the Last Time You Wrote a Letter?

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

“I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter, and make believe it came from you.”  If you can believe statistics, soon that may be the only way you’ll get a letter in the mail.  Those words from the 1935 popular song by Fred E. Ahlert and Joe Young seem to have foreshadowed the demise of letter writing that we are experiencing today.  A hundred years before that song was written, a letter was the only way to send news no matter how urgent or time sensitive it was. 

Times certainly have changed.  As I reflect on my own life and the revolution I’ve seen in the way we communicate, it amazes me.  Do you remember three-minute long-distance calls in the evening or on weekends because that’s when the rates were lower?  As the years went on, the telephone became the favorite way to communicate and we could talk for as long as we wanted.  Lately, we’ve gotten used to email because it can reach across the street or around the globe almost immediately and it’s free.  Now email may even be on its way out because the next generation prefers texting and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

What does all this mean?  It seems to me that these new forms of communication often produce messages with a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors, but the impact doesn’t stop there.  A poor substitute for composing a letter, chatting, tweeting and texting tend to discourage the enrichment of deliberate thought.  Did you know that much of history was written through personal letters?   The personal missives to friends and associates written by Pliny the Younger in the first century A.D. give us a unique picture of everyday life in Rome.  And when he wrote to his friend Tacitus about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., his attention to detail was so precise that scientists today still describe that type of eruption as Plinian.

And then there are the letters in your own attic or that trunk in the basement or the shoebox on the closet shelf that chronicle your own growing up years, World War II, your first job, your first love, and the story of how your family grew. They also show what you were thinking and may even  reflect how you came to think that way—something that doesn’t often happen in today’s world where responses are instantaneous. The record of our lives needs to be more than a status update.  We can’t substitute the nuances of our experiences with an emoticon—and in case you’re wondering, that’s the smiley face at the end of a sentence.

A handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item according to The Letter Writers Alliance which is dedicated to preserving the art of letter writing.  And it doesn’t even have to be mailed.  Parade Magazine carried the story recently of a Vermont nursing student cramming for a rigorous exam who found an anonymous note tucked inside her textbook when she returned to her table in a coffee shop.  “I want to start by saying that you should be so proud of yourself! You’ve worked so hard to get here, and I promise you, it’s so worth it. I’ve been a nurse for 12 years and can’t imagine doing anything else.”  The nursing student shared it online and it went viral.  And so the story of the lost art of letter writing comes full circle.