Joe Q. Public does not know how to address a letter. Jane A. Student has never received one, and furthermore, she collides frequently with peers and telephone poles while attempting to simultaneously walk and text.
Reader, I don't doubt that you're familiar with every cliché I might name in support of this argument, which is itself very likely one you've already heard from your grandfather or great aunt Harriet. But please, hear me out. An occasional truth does lurk in nostalgic truisms, and in hopes of revealing one I will belabor this point in print.
No one writes letters to anyone anymore, and that's just a shame.
Granted, it is also an easily understandable development. Between cell phones and the Internet, we inhabit a world of unprecedented ease of communication - you were, perhaps, already aware of this. You e-mail a professor to clarify an assignment, text a friend to arrange meeting for lunch and send your brother a funny picture with scarcely a pause to breathe, let alone to reflect. To restate the obvious - always, and all but effortlessly, one is in touch with whomever one feels the need to keep in touch.
No one can argue that such convenience is a bad thing. But, I doubt that it's an unqualified good.
Consider information-age forms of communication. A text message is a terse affair; it is quickly written, instantaneously sent and received, quickly read and as just quickly deleted, leaving no physical trace. An e-mail might be more substantive - it can even be lengthy, and that's no wonder given that you must sit down at a computer to write it and check back later for a response - but it is also rapid, non-physical and often thoughtlessly composed. A phone call occurs in real time. Therefore it is totally unstructured, and one can hardly pull it out to look at weeks after it ends.
Compare these with the hand-written letter, that graceful, though increasingly quaint, thing. A letter takes time and willpower to write, particularly when so many easier ways of contacting absent friends are so readily available. Therefore it is often long and well thought out.
2008 Woodie Awards
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