Blog Post #3 - Dear John...

In some was the business letter has become anachronistic. As a person who is old enough to have collected stamps as a child, I bemoan the demise of the old-fashioned letter. I work in media, and I still drive to the post office in the morning to check the box and to cart handfuls of bills, checks and random correspondence to my tiny office. For the most part these days it is all email, direct deposit, or the occasional fax. Everything is digital, informal, immediate.

In some ways the format of the middle ages letter is antithetical to the modern email - it saves its questions and requests for the end. The arrangement of information allows the writer to build up to his point or purpose in much the same way a speaker does verbally. Email encourages us to be up front with the purpose of the message. It prizes simplicity and the requirements of the medium (the necessity of subject lines, or example) force the messages into a particular format.

Email has replaced many functions previously handled through traditional correspondence - bills, notices, purchase orders - have all gone digital.

What the digital revolution does not take into account is that emails do not fulfill the other essential purpose of a letter. They are impermanent, temporary and informal. Try taking a print out of an email to court and see if the judge accepts it as an official document. If you ever have a dispute with a credit card company or creditor of some kind send all your requests and correspondence through the mail. It leaves an official record of the correspondence that even the most accurate time stamp can not provide.

One of the great things about formal letters is that they show respect for their subject matter. There is something almost offensive about receiving an email about a sensitive topic. In personal matters, as well as many matters of business an email is insufficient. You would not send a text message Dear John would you? Perhaps the internet generations would at that.

A final thought - letters have long been a key way that historians reconstruct the events of the past. What will future scholars look to to understand our culture and history? Sure there will be movies, video, long-dead webpage ghost towns and scraps of Facebook. But none of these delve into or reveal thoughts and feelings in the same way that a personal letter to a friend can...

One of my favorite letters of all time was written by Neal Cassady and it begins:

Dear Jack:
I am sitting in a bar on Market St. I'm drunk, well, not quite, but I soon will be. I am here for 2 reasons; I must wait 5 hours for the bus to Denver & lastly but, most importantly, I'm here (drinking) because, of course, because of a woman & what a woman! To be chronological about it:

I was sitting on the bus when it took on more passengers at Indianapolis, Indiana -- a perfectly proportioned beautiful, intellectual, passionate, personification of Venus De Milo asked me if the seat beside me was taken!!! I gulped, (I'm drunk) gargled & stammered NO! (Paradox of expression, after all, how can one stammer No!!?) She sat -- I sweated -- She started to speak, I knew it would be generalities, so to tempt her I remained silent.

She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 PM (Dark!) I didn't speak until 10 PM -- in the intervening 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT...

Better than a tweet if you ask me.