letter writing is a dying art essay

Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting ‘the full catastrophe of life’

PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne

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Edwina Preston received funding from the Australia Council for her latest published novel.

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Letters did not count [as writing]. A woman might write letters while sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene.

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Last year I went to the funeral of a friend with whom I shared a house in Melbourne in the early 1990s. While I and my other housemates went on to the full array of box-ticking life experiences – children, careers, relationships, houses – our friend was diagnosed with an aggressive form of multiple sclerosis in her early twenties. When she died, we had not heard her voice for many years.

Of all the eulogies at her funeral, the most arresting was a letter she’d written at 23, read aloud by a former housemate, Delia. Our friend had been travelling at the time; negotiating a fledgling relationship, digesting the reality of her diagnosis, preparing for the suddenly precarious unfolding of her life.

She hadn’t spoken for so long but here in this letter, this imprint of her voice on paper, she sprang suddenly into life. Funny, irreverent, honest, scared: we could hear her. The occasion was sad; but the letter was joyful.

I had forgotten what a powerful time capsule a letter could be.

Read more: Post apocalypse: the end of daily letter deliveries is in sight

Gen X-ers occupy a distinctly precious cultural position – straddling the analogue past of letter writing and the hyper-digital present of TikTok and Instagram. One of my earliest school memories is of learning how to transcribe an address onto an envelope in the form required by post offices (carefully indented at every line, return address on the back). It seems almost archaic now.

We may not have been “the last generation of devoted letter writers” – that title goes to our parents’ or grandparents’ generation – but letter-writing was still a necessary, carefully taught skill when we were growing up.

It was the normal way to communicate with grandparents, international pen-pals, and school friends who had moved to the country. We all sat down at school camp on the first night and wrote our parents a letter, Camp Granada style, supervised by prowling teachers who made sure we gave our parents a worthy account.

I remember too how important it was, as a young adult in the world of pre-internet travel, to land in a far-flung place, track down the Poste Restante and find miraculously waiting for you – as though your arrival was predestined – a handful of pale blue aerograms, enscripted with miniscule, space-saving writing. Letters from home.

In momentary deferral to the anti-hoarding gods, I recently threw out a tranche of these aerograms, sent to me when I travelled India as a 19-year-old. I not only curse myself when I think of this now, but I feel an actual pain in my chest. What insights have I lost into my former self, my family and my friends as a result?

The human condition

The disappearance of letter-writing from Western cultural life is such a recent phenomenon that I don’t dare proclaim its death. From Abelard and Heloise’s 12th-century love missives , dense with biblical references but no less dense with longing, to the letters of Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, it’s hard to imagine how we might have made sense of the human condition without the insights gleaned from letters.

What would we know of the interior worlds of artists and writers, scientists and politicians, sisters and friends and lovers? What would we know about life itself? Or, as importantly, about how to live ? In the first century AD, Seneca articulated his philosophy of stoicism via a series of 124 “ moral letters ” to his young friend Lucilius.

These letters are only nominally a private correspondence between two men; in fact, they were written for a much larger readership that might benefit from Seneca’s solutions to the moral dilemmas of living in the world.

Even if one side of the conversation (Lucilius’s) remained unheard, the letter, as a form, lent a sense of reciprocity and intimacy to Seneca’s words – it enabled him to speak to many as though he were speaking to one. With titles such as “On saving time”, “On old age and death”, “On the relativity of fame”, “On care of health and peace of mind”, Seneca’s letters continue to resonate 2,000 years later.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s ten Letters to a Young Poet , written in 1903-08 and published posthumously in 1929, provided creative guidance to his young recipient, a Czech poet and military student. These letters are famous for Rilke’s inordinately gentle manner, his tenderness and warmth.

Yet it seems that, in breathing a philosophy of art and life into the ear of his young admirer, Rilke also breathes it affirmingly into himself, and into the generations privy to the correspondence since. I noticed traces of his philosophy of creativity – which emphasises patience and attentiveness to the small things of life – in a 1961 letter from Patrick White to Thea Astley I recently read:

Read, think & listen to silence, & shell the peas … concentrating on the work in hand until you know what it is to be a pea — and drudge at the school, & sleep with your husband & bring up your child. That is what I mean when I say “living” …

Unlike the essay or the novel, letters facilitate a kind of collapsing of low and high, profound and profane, the life of domesticity and the life of the spirit. They are not master accounts of ourselves, with all the incidentals written out.

Writer Maria Popova, commenting on the mid-century correspondence of illustrator Edward Gorey and author Peter F. Neumeyer , says the two men wrote to each other of everything “from metaphysics to pancake recipes”.

This democratic levelling of subject matter is perhaps nowhere more evident than in letters, where hierarchies of value don’t prevail as they do in more authoritatively literary forms: the traditional novel, for instance, in which everything must gear toward thematic and narrative resolution.

Letting the real world in

Megan O’Grady, in the New York Times , has described letters as “leaky” in the way they allow a seepage of the real world to occur: “the baby wakes from the nap and cries; the air-raid siren sounds; the social mores and psychodynamics of other eras filter in”. In correspondence, even the rhetorical devices of transition, the elegant segues that smooth a jagged change of subject, are largely dispensed with.

No one, writing a letter, agonises over the wording of a sentence that links two paragraphs. A trail of unexplained ellipses has a particular function in a letter – to break a chain of thought, to attest to bodily movement in temporal space: a kettle being put on, a doorbell answered, a nappy changed.

My friend Delia, reading over letters from her friends in the early 1990s when she was a student in America, said:

It was funny reading these letters back. Sometimes they would be written over days, or even weeks, they’d stop and start and stop again: “Sorry, got distracted with something. Anyway …” Or be continually updated: “Well, I finally got a phone call from X, you won’t believe what happened …”

They were provisional, real-time, patched-together accounts of life as we lived it, as it occurred, on the spot. An unspooling of self onto the page in real time.

Or selves perhaps; each letter, each recipient, facilitating an adjustment of the self, a tweak: there’s the correspondent we make laugh, the correspondent we confide in, the correspondent to whom we offer advice and comfort. Like a diary, a letter can function as a “chronicle of [one’s] hours and days”, but because it is, in essence, a two-way communication – an ongoing, unfinished conversation – a letter invokes a relationship so it needs to be sensitive to the reader in ways a diary need not.

It needs to configure itself for entertainment value. It’s one of the few writing forms that allows the mind of the writer to roam freely, independently, and yet actively connect with an attentive, and presumably sympathetic, reader: a known reader.

The materiality of letters sets them apart from today’s electronic equivalents. Letters are disarmingly tangible when we chance upon them in a forgotten box or tin or bundle: we might have forgotten them, but they didn’t cease to exist. They offer curious subtexts too, not least to do with the presence of the human hand on paper.

A different kind of utterance

I have in my possession pages of my late grandmother’s “scribble” – a self-deprecating term she used (for her handwriting or for the thoughts her letters contained? I was never sure which).

Her backwards-scooping scrawl carries with it her personality somehow – occasionally, I see an echo of it in my own handwriting, a certain soft flourish in an “h” or an “n”. I remember the pale blue pages on which her letters were written, and my habit of placing a heavy-ruled piece of paper beneath my own when I wrote back to her, to ensure my lines were straight.

Particularly precious in my family is a letter written to my father as a little boy by his own father, stationed on an air base in New Guinea in 1943. The letter, on tiny yellow paper, is written in flawless copperplate – a skill my grandfather was particularly proud of, having left school at 12 – and the front of the envelope is illustrated with an image of Ginger Meggs, hand-drawn in coloured ink.

Returning after the war, my grandfather was a difficult, traumatised man, but in his letter there’s a glimpse of the loving young father and husband he was before:

Dear Barry Just a few lines from your Daddy hoping it finds you well; and I also trust that your little yacht arrived alright; and I do hope it sails well for it has really big sails though I think you shall be able to manage it alright after Mum has fixed it all up for you […] Now Barry I guess you are wondering when I shall be home, well I really thought that I would be home for Xmas but now it looks like it shall be early in the new year so I am hoping I get back in time for your birthday for if I do, we shall sure have a birthday party, won’t we, with just you and Leslie and Mumie and me …“

In the last years of my own father’s life, this tiny hand-inked letter had pride of place in a glass display case in his residential care unit: a beautiful relic, the ephemeral trapped on paper.

It reminds me of a similarly gentle, loving letter written by John Steinbeck to his son in 1958, upon his son’s announcement that he had fallen in love:

Dear Thom: First – if you are in love – that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second – There are several kinds of love […] The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

Did Steinbeck speak as honestly and tenderly to his son in person? Perhaps, I don’t know. But it’s possible that letters allowed a different kind of utterance for "strong, silent” men of past generations: a benevolent “father-tongue” (lower case) which enabled them to shed, if momentarily, the practised hardness of masculinity.

I know that my grandfather’s letter contains a grace and sweetness that was not present in person. In person, his expression of love was to teach my father how to box.

Read more: Hold the post: there's no such thing as a dead letter

Famous love letters

Love letters, of course, occupy a place of their own within the “genre”, if it can be called a genre. The 5,000 or so letters between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Steiglitz , penned across 30 years, provide a window onto the mutual creative inspiration that existed between the two artists, but also include searing love letters that testify to an enduring sensuality.

“Dearest,” writes Georgia:

— my body is simply crazy with wanting you – If you don’t come tomorrow – I don’t see how I can wait for you – I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours – the kisses – the hotness – the wetness – all melting together – the being held so tight that it hurts – the strangle and the struggle.

On a voyeuristic level, the love letters of the famous gratify our curiosity – what went on between these two giants of the screen/literary world/art scene? Were they (are they?) like us in their lusts and their pettinesses? Often, yes, they are like us – we’re reassured by their broken promises and bickerings and insecurities.

They say things they shouldn’t, embarrassing things, things they later regret. T.S. Eliot later disavowed his fervent love letters to American speech and drama teacher Emily Hale – they “were the letters of an hallucinated man,” he said. Nevertheless, these letters have an ardour, a heart-on-the-sleeve earnestness, that reveals a different side to the cool modernist poet, a side that was warm-blooded, ruled by the heart, even, possibly, vulnerable.

Letters are immediate; we write them from inside the moment, and so the immediate, the moment, becomes the truth. Their vigour, and their value, lies in this unedited, uneditable quality: they document us, trap fleeting moments in glass. We might even say things that bare our souls. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” wrote Vita Sackville-West famously to Virginia Woolf in one such moment in 1926.

Some of the funniest/“dirtiest” letters on the public record are James Joyce’s letters to his wife Nora Barnacle , in which he joyously catalogues her repertoire of farts:

big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole … I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

The publication of the letters in 1975 upset Joyce’s grandson, but the correspondence reveals a healthy mutual sexual relationship, free of any false social pieties and, certainly, of embarrassment.

The love letters of famous writers have a pith and poetry the rest of us might not be equal to, but even the simplest love letters, if they’re heartfelt, speak of who we are, or once were, and how we affected other people. They are testament to the risks we take to express deep and difficult feelings; the things we might not have been able to say in the flesh.

My first boyfriend says he wrote me a love letter when we were 16 and I sent it back to him with the spelling corrected in red pen. I can’t remember the spirit with which I embarked on this particular revision, but it’s retrospectively both very funny and an insight into my own priggishness. Nor can I imagine making such amendments now using tracked changes – somehow I think it would be less funny and more tragic.

I have in my possession other love letters from the pre-internet age – not many, a few. They embarrassed me, mainly, at the time, but I’m glad I’ve kept them – they are charged with a force that cuts through time, and connects me with myself as a younger, if more callous, person.

Read more: 'Weaponised irony': after fictionalising Elizabeth Macarthur's life, Kate Grenville edits her letters

Email and autocorrect

And while famous love letters of the past are collected, collated and curated for public consumption, I’m not sure a 21st-century romantic email correspondence will have the same longevity. For one thing, emails are less spontaneous: if only because they are infinitely revisable, deletable – as well as easily forwardable (accidentally or otherwise).

They don’t contain the mark of the person, the pecularities of handwriting or, yes, spelling mistakes – autocorrect puts out these interesting little fires. Writes O’Grady: “It’s hard to imagine that in 50 years we’ll be picking up The Collected Emails of Zadie Smith.”

Email won’t ever be a replacement for the unfolding, from a wadded envelope, of several pages of lovingly tended text. For me, at least. I use email for collegiate communications, friendly transactions, social to-ings and fro-ings. While it might provide the last vestige of formality in an increasingly informal communications world, email remains an inadequate substitute for letters.

Delayed gratification – part of the frisson of a traditional correspondence – is a bad portent when it comes to emails. It’s easy to interpret even the briefest email silence as unwillingness or neglect on the part of the recipient. O’Grady writes:

Email – already an old-fashioned form – isn’t really the electronic replacement of the letter but a different mode of communication entirely: fleeter, tactical, somehow both more and less disposable. It is unwise to commit too much of oneself to electronic code, which lives on in some ether or another, unflung into the fireplace.

Text messages are semiotically interesting in the way they codify language and narrative, but their idiom is brevity. You can flirt in a series of text messages, you can also argue, but you can’t reflect the way you might in a letter; it’s easy to send a platitude or establish a rapport in a text, not so easy to tease out a philosophy.

Letter-writing is a commitment of time and an offering of trust, both an indulgence and an act of generosity. It must trust that what is being related will be accepted. It must assume that its confidences will be honoured.

‘The stuff of life’

As a writer looking for a literary device with which to capture the voice of a troubled female poet in 1960s Melbourne, first-person narrative didn’t work. I tried and got nowhere. It couldn’t satisfactorily make visible the ruptures and randomness of my character’s life, its trivial details and entertaining side-notes: the nappies she had to run off and attend to; the soggy egg cartons glimpsed dishearteningly through a window; the clothesline she feared being garrotted by.

If it’s not doing something to further the narrative , goes the traditional novel-writing wisdom, cut it out . But I wanted to put in the things that didn’t further the narrative: the ephemeral things, apparently unimportant, that are actually the stuff of life.

Letter-writing allows this stuff to be present. Perhaps it’s the only traditional writing form that does, and it gave me a credible reason for putting the trivial, the small, the fleeting into my story. And when I did, to my surprise, my character came to life: she became spontaneous and real and began to speak in a language and voice that seemed authentic.

In her wonderful 1988 essay about writing and motherhood, The Fisherwoman’s Daughter , Ursula Le Guin used the term “mother tongue” to describe an “authentic” women’s language. The mother tongue, she says, speaks with intimacy, proximity, connectivity; it’s the voice with which we talk to a neighbour over the fence, or to our children when they come home late, or to our partners when it’s their turn to take out the bins, or our friends when we’re trying to make them laugh over a drink.

Its power is not in dividing but in binding … We all know it by heart. John have you got your umbrella I think it’s going to rain. Can you come play with me? If I told you once I told you a hundred times … O what am I going to do? … Pass the soy sauce please. Oh, shit … You look like what the cat dragged in …

In its use of the mother tongue, correspondence actually corresponds with the ways we interact with people in our lives, as well as with the spontaneities of speech itself. It doesn’t pretend the writer is not a real person, speaking in an authoritative void, like an oracle, to untethered, disembodied others. It allows the full catastrophe of life to be present and visible.

Researching the letters of women poets in preparation for working on my novel , I realised letter-writing has always been socially acceptable for women in ways the “master” forms of literary production – the novel, the poem – haven’t been. So long as they were literate, women have always written letters – as an essential form of communication and self-expression, but also because writing letters didn’t disturb the status quo or conflict with domestic or mothering responsibilities.

A woman didn’t need to consciously conceive of herself as a “writer” in order to be an avid letter-writer. And a woman didn’t need a “room of her own” in order to write her letters; she could write them among the potato peels and bills and children’s laundry. Quietly, (apparently) benignly, women have for centuries been able to refine and experiment with their writing practice under the guise of merely “writing a letter”.

So perhaps letter-writing has functioned as a kind of ruse or subterfuge for women: a way of writing without seeming to have “unseemly” writerly ambitions. I think of my grandmother’s characterisation of her letters as “scribble”.

It was not the done thing for a woman of her generation to publicise her accomplishments, but I knew she knew she was a good writer, with lovely handwriting, and a gentle and responsive style. Calling her writing “scribble”, I realised, was a way of repudiating the criticism of thinking she had something to say, but getting on with the job of saying it nevertheless.

As I wrote my character’s letters to her sister, I became more and more convinced that letter-writing has functioned as a radical, maybe even revolutionary, writing form for women. This is because, on the one hand, it was considered so socially unthreatening that it went under the radar, and, on the other, because it allowed the small daily realities of women’s lives to be made visible.

It could be written from within the midst of their lives – not separate, not in a garret room or writer’s hut — but right there, on the kitchen table amongst the scraps and the bills and the children’s toys.

Gregory Kratzmann, editor of Australian poet Gwen Harwood’s voluminous correspondence, says Harwood wrote her correspondence in precisely this way:

She wrote letters quickly and with great facility, often when she was surrounded by domestic activity […] sometimes three or more long letters in the same day […] the activity of writing was an essential part of living […]

The prolific 19th-century novelist Margaret Oliphant used this same “kitchen-table” approach to write her novels – and there were nearly one hundred of them. Far from imperilling her progress, she felt that

her writing profited, from the difficult, obscure, chancy connection between the art work and emotional/manual/managerial complex of skills and tasks called “housework,” and that to sever that connection would put the writing itself at risk, would make it, in her word, unnatural.

If letter-writing can tolerate interruption, distraction, diversion, it stands to reason that novel writing can too. And poetry writing. And even philosophical treatise writing. Perhaps being interrupted is not so terrible nor so damaging to artistic creation as we have always thought. Who says that the uninterrupted thought is better than the interrupted one?

Read more: Gwen Harwood was one of Australia's finest poets – she was also one of the most subversive

‘The framing of a sentence’

I have never had an inviolate writing space of my own. Everything I have written has been interrupted constantly by children and domestic demands. I stop to remedy problems; attend to outbursts of screaming; acquire and prepare drawing materials; find lost books; answer spelling enquiries; listen to an imaginative narrative just written; lace on rollerblades; deal with insistent lamentations that “There’s nothing to eat”.

My writing space has been fundamentally accessible to my children: they remove pens and papers and post-it notes, use my desk as a place to apply nail-polish, leave tell-tale trails of crumbs and rings from glasses. Yes, it’s annoying. Does it make my writing worse? No. Sometimes it makes it better.

Writing my character, contemplating all this, I thought – dare I say it? – that perhaps Virginia Woolf was wrong. Perhaps “a room of one’s own” has never been necessary to the writing of prose. Perhaps the seeds of a different kind of writing practice, one that served women’s realities and responsibilities better, can be glimpsed in the practice of letter writing.

Correspondence has always enabled women to become caught up, immersed, in the moment of the work, yet remain equally available and connected to life around them.

Thus it deserves our attention, even as it fades from view as a writing practice. To return to Virginia Woolf’s silently observed letter-writing girl at the beginning of this essay: “[W]hat a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene.”

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The Endangered Art of Letter-Writing

“There’s nothing nicer than opening the mailbox and seeing something friendly, something that’s not a bill.”

Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic ’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.

This week she talks with two women who met as strangers on a ferry. Their casual conversation turned into a summer spent together in Canada, and then into a 40-year pen-palship. They documented job changes, marriages, divorces, and life’s other ups and downs, staying committed to physical letters the whole time. They discuss what’s so special about the endangered art of letter-writing and how it’s sustained their friendship even though they rarely see each other in person.

The Friends: Julie Fletcher , 62, a writer and editor who lives in Ottawa, Canada Belinda Spofforth , 68, a psychotherapist who lives in Lee-on-the-Solent, England

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: When and how did you meet?

Julie Fletcher: I was on the Toronto ferry with [my friend] Kelly—who has since passed away—in the summer of 1981, going to Toronto Island to go to the beach there. You, Bella, were also on the ferry and you started talking to us. We ended up chatting, spending the day together, and exchanging contact info.

And then we did all kinds of things. We ended up camping and going whitewater rafting together. And we did a lot of, I don't know, going out and drinking probably.

Belinda Spofforth: The whitewater rafting was terrific. I've got a photograph of us [doing that] in my bathroom. I'm grinning at the front.

[After the trip to Toronto] I went out West. I took a trip to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, down to the Rockies.

Julie: And I stayed for a few more months and then I went back home to Florida. We spent most of that summer together in 1981.

Beck: What made you want to stay in touch with someone you just had a chat with on a ferry? What took it to the next level?

Julie: Going back to that summer, the thing I remember most is that you were one of the funniest people I'd ever met. My God, we just laughed all the time. It’s funny because Kelly and I didn't stay in touch, but you and I did. Bella is just a fabulous correspondent. You were always really good about sending birthday and Christmas cards. Before we had kids, we probably wrote even more than twice a year.

I always loved writing letters. And then it became such a rarity. I tell people that I have one person in the world who I still exchange letters with.

Belinda: I mean, there were only letters in those days. So the only way to correspond was through letters, and that kept it going for me.

Beck: I thought it might be fun if you each described the other person's letter-writing style.

Belinda: Julie writes beautifully—her English, her diction, and the words she uses. I just admire the flow of her writing. Her spelling is perfect. And she’s very informative, telling me all about what she's doing, about the kids, about this and that. When her letters came, I would always put them to one side and wait until I had time to digest them and enjoy them.

Julie: Because they were so damn long.

Belinda: We used to do long ones. You still do long ones, because you tend to do it on the computer.

Julie: Yes, I type them now.

The first thing I would have to say about Bella's letters is [that her handwriting is] really hard to read. But I get through them. I've gotten very good at it now; I only occasionally have to ask her what she said. I love her turns of phrase. I love how she says things in her British way. She makes me laugh. I don't hear nearly as much about her travels as I would like to, but she's always off somewhere amazing, traveling the world by herself.

Belinda: [I caught] a bit of a bug, which started off with Canada.

Beck: How did your lives progress, and how did the letters and your friendship intersect with big moments in your lives? Do you remember celebrating together or being a support system for each other through your letters?

Julie: Oh gosh, we've written about everything.

Belinda: That's a big question isn't it? I mean we're talking about—what, 40 years now?

Julie: We were single and footloose and fancy-free, then we both got married and had children and got divorced. And I've remarried. I'm like Bella—I always save her letters for when I know I have some time to read them without interruption. And I remember one summer there was a letter from her and there was just something about the first few paragraphs that made me think, Oh, there's some big news in here . It put me on edge a little bit. Bella, that was the letter where you told me about the breakup of your marriage. I still remember that feeling so well, the foreboding of the first few lines.

Belinda: We've been very open in our letters about our family situations. And with Julie’s ex-husband, I remember the struggle and how brave Julie was as she attempted to keep the marriage together. I suppose I sensed that it probably wouldn't work. It has to take two. It’s terribly tragic, really.

Julie: It's tough. Both of our kids have had their struggles too. And there are ups and downs with jobs and moving. We’ve written about it all over the years.

Belinda: Things haven't stayed static, have they?

Julie sent me quite a long letter, which I just opened today. [ This was in late March. ] And she was excited because we were going to meet up in June. I just sent her a note to say “I doubt this will happen.” And how sad is that?

Julie: Yeah, we're going to have to wait. But we've been able to see each other a few times [in the past], maybe four or five. My ex-husband and I brought our kids to London when they were very young—in 2005—to meet Bella. I said to my kids, “I bet you anything, when Bella and I hug, she's going to pick me up.” Every time we saw each other she would pick me up because she's so much taller than I am. I'm not even 5 feet. And sure enough, she did.

Beck: In between seeing each other, have you guys stuck with only physical letters, or have you branched out into emails or phone calls as well?

Julie: More emails recently, but I'm determined to still do the letters, although I do type them now.

Belinda: Julie has become better than me on that. I write Christmas and birthdays, but email in between.

Julie: And my letters are always, always late. That's why you got a letter in February for Christmas.

Beck: What is it about physical letters that has stayed so special for you?

Belinda: Picking them up from the floor, actually opening the envelope, looking at the stamp, and saving the stamp. Feeling the paper and seeing the written word—it's everything. I still read books. I don't have a Kindle. I like to physically touch things.

Julie: I’m the same. There’s nothing nicer than opening the mailbox and seeing something friendly, something that's not a bill or trying to sell me something. And I recognize Bella's handwriting right away. When I was at camp, I would write letters home when none of the other kids did. It’s nice to have a correspondent who will write back.

Belinda: I don't see the correspondence ever stopping until one of us dies. Or we become unable to read or write. Hopefully that won’t happen, because I’m just going to pop away without any problems of course.

Julie: Me too.

Belinda: And I hope to see you, Julie, this year, not next year.

Julie: My new husband and I were going to come to the U.K. in June, not far from where Bella lives. But it's been really hard-hit by this virus, I gather. So it's probably going to be next year before we can do it. We just have to stay healthy and fit up until then. And then you can pop off.

If you or someone you know should be featured on The Friendship Files, get in touch at [email protected] and tell us a bit about what makes the friendship unique.

The Humane Art: Virginia Woolf on What Killed Letter Writing and Why We Ought to Keep It Alive

By maria popova.

Countering the biographer’s assertion that Walpole’s letters were “inspired not by the love of friends but the love of posterity” — a tool of history rather than of his inner world — Woolf considers the general genius of the letter writer:

If we believe that Horace Walpole was a historian in disguise, we are denying his peculiar genius as a letter writer. The letter writer is no surreptitious historian. He is a man of short range sensibility; he speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private. All good letter writers feel the drag of the face on the other side of the age and obey it — they take as much as they give.

Woolf makes the curious but instantly sensical proposition that the rise of her very own ilk — the paid writer — is what spelled the decline of fine letter writing:

Was it … the growth of writing as a paid profession, and the change which that change of focus brought with it that led, in the nineteenth century, to the decline of this humane art?

In prescient sentiment that resonates all the more loudly as we consider the currency of the social media age, she points to new media in particular as the dagger at the heart of the personal letter:

News and gossip, the sticks and straws out of which the old letter writer made his nest, have been snatched away. The wireless and the telephone have intervened. The letter writer has nothing now to build with except what is most private; and how monotonous after a page or two the intensity of the very private becomes!

As though with blogs and Tumblrs and Facebook feeds in mind, Woolf writes:

Instead of letters posterity will have confessions, diaries, notebooks… — hybrid books in which the writer talks in the dark to himself about himself for a generation yet to be born.

Returning to Walpole, she considers what his letters — and the traditional art of epistolary correspondence in general — reveal about the vitalizing role of real letters in our lives, as an anchor to both our tribe and to our own identity. As we continuously struggle to understand what binds our past selves and our future selves together into the same person , Woolf points to the power of the letter, which bridges two privacies, in assuring us of our own selves, at once stable and self-renewing :

Above all he was blessed in his little public — a circle that surrounded him with that warm climate in which he could live the life of incessant changes which is the breath of a letter writer’s existence. Besides the wit and the anecdote and the brilliant descriptions of masquerades and midnight revelries his friends drew from him something superficial yet profound, something changing yet entire — himself shall we call it in default of one word for that which friends elicit but the great public kills? From that sprang his immortality. For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Whether it is an act of supreme irony or supreme affirmation that Woolf herself ended her life with a letter — and a letter so cruelly commoditized by the era’s parasitic news media — remains an open question.

Complement with Woolf on the creative benefits of keeping a diary , writing and consciousness , and her breathtaking love letters to Vita Sackville-West .

— Published November 20, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/20/the-humane-art-virginia-woolf/ —

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The lost art of letter writing

Of words we’re born, unleashed by pages’ gates

to build the cosmos consciousness creates.

Though tricked to feast on gleaming screens, our souls

are tied by birth to letters’ glor’ous shoals

With Adam’s rib the writer’s quill is made  

and precious baby’s blood is thenceforth laid

as ink to come alive and smear upon

a letter, birthing rise to timeless spawn

Yet Love’s dear papers burn in time’s dark flames

and words become but pawns in Iron games.

So rescue you we must, or ne’er be known

the light of humans’ blazing cornerstone.

I’m certainly not the first to write about the lost art of letter writing — an art that has been usurped by technology, texts and tweets. From TED Talks to entire books, there is no shortage of ways in which people have commented on the dastardly disappearance of hand-written notes. With the hope of not restating what has already been said, my iambs suggest that letters are not only nice to have around (the general consensus), but are foundational, natural aspects of our being… we shouldn’t burn them in time’s “dark flames,” for doing so might engulf us in the fire. So, beautiful reader, I now write a letter to you… perhaps it will convince you to rescue a lost art.

Dear Reader, 

Why are handwritten notes so irreplaceable and infinitely invaluable? Letters, first and foremost, require intimate intentionality. Every alphabetic character and word requires a myriad of microdecisions — will I loop my “y’s”? Will I sharpen my “q’s”? Will I compose words sloppily, spurting out my spirling thoughts? Or will I dedicate time to tidily and tediously tighten my script? Unlike the typed word, a written script deeply exposes our thoughts — our naked, raw selves. The page itself also tells a distinct story — tear marks splatter apologies; erased lines elicit caution; crumpled sides allude to disorder.

How do I know? I suppose I first picked up on the powerful weight of letters when my Grandma revealed that she had kept every single note my brother and I had ever written her. Yep — from smeared, incoherent, preschool letters to graduation thank-you notes, my Grandma’s got ’em. It’s no surprise that I now have hundreds of letters saved in the back of my closet, stuffed into a gumball machine. No, hundreds of people have not randomly written me letters of adoration (I’m not that good of a person). Rather, ten years ago, I became a part of a tradition at my summer camp in which campers write and receive “plane letters.” A “plane letter” is an intensely personal letter written to a friend at the end of the camp session. The recipients of the letters read them on the plane flight (or car ride) home from camp, hence the name. The letters express everything campers love about their friends… every beautiful detail, unseen act of kindness and magical eccentricity. 

As you can imagine, the letters I have received mean the world to me. They span years, personal milestones and friendships lost or steadfast. This is no exaggeration to say: through these letters, I track my life. I see myself grow, build deep relationships and spread love into the world. At the risk of sounding grim, if I ever start to feel useless in this world, I’ll pop open the gumball machine and read… read about how I can make a difference; read that I can choose light; read that the world is overflowing (just like my gumball machine) with abundant warmth. And these letters would not have the same impact if transposed onto a screen. The tangible feeling of the paper in my hands is the only thing that makes me realize that I exist.

       I am here — just like the paper of this letter.

       I am loved — just like scribbled words confirm. 

The only thing better than reading a “plane letter” is… you guessed it… writing one. Writing these letters (and others like them) provides me with infinite yet tangible space to fully articulate how much I love someone in my life. What a gift! Without my words existing on a timeless page, my gratefulness would be reduced to triviality. So maybe this shouldn’t be a letter to the reader, after all. Maybe this should be a letter to letters themself… a love letter. 

Dear letters, 

Oh, how you have changed my life! You are to me what Laura was to Petrarch — you are my muse, my love, my hope, my joy, my song! Don’t die! Don’t make me follow suit with dear Juliet! Continue to use your power! Bring lovers together! Mend broken trust!

Though you can be burned, your impact cannot be! Technology is fickle and unpredictable. You, sweet letters, are faithful and steadfast! Continue to show the world your steady loyalty.

PLEASE don’t give up on humankind! PLEASE! We are beginning to see the err in our ways. We are beginning to see that destroying you is destroying an essential aspect of our souls. Our souls, after all, crave being known and being loved—and you can give us that. We will return to you! In the meantime, know that some of us care: us hopeless romantics and old souls… we care! So don’t give up on us — we haven’t given up on you.

Sincerely, 

Susanna Newsom

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Today's Paper | April 05, 2024

The dying art of letter-writing and dr hamidullah’s letters.

WE may term letter-writing a dying art today. I mean the real letter, handwritten on a piece of paper and sent through what is known as ‘snail mail’ in today’s technologically adva­nced world as communicating with someone is proverbially just a few clicks away.

Some may even say sending letters in a conventional way is waste of time now. But Lord Morley was perhaps a bit cynical when he said of letter-writing that it was “the most delightful way of wasting time”. Well, maybe. But some cranky old men like this writer may say that social media is the fastest, cheapest and meanest way of wasting time.

Email and other modern communication techniques may have consigned the conventional letters to the grave, but you would perhaps agree that receiving a letter through the post has a thrill of its own. And, as the Arabic proverb goes, a letter is half as good as meeting someone personally. An old-fashioned letter may offer the sincerity, originality of expression and creativity that most of the emails lack. And, the old-fashioned, handwritten, delivered-in-post letters are known for their depth and the real inner feelings.

Some of the intellectuals who were prolific letter writers too opened up a whole new world of thought. Their personal letters offer glimpses of their personal life as well as their inner thoughts and deeper feelings that we could hardly find in their formal writings.

One such example is Dr Muhammad Hamidullah. He was as prolific when it came to writing letters: in addition to over 170 books in several languages — including French, English, Arabic, Urdu and Persian — Dr Hamidullah penned thousands of letters to his friends, relatives and the seekers of knowledge who wrote to him and they included students, researchers, teachers, scholars and intellectuals.

Replying to a letter was a ritual that Muhammad Hamidullah sahib religiously followed. Hardly, if ever, there was any letter that he did not reply to. Though some of the letters that he received might have been a distraction for him and would have cost him the most precious of his assets: time. Dr Hamidullah spent almost every moment of his waking hours reading, writing, editing, teaching and thinking. He never married and lived in a very modest Paris apartment, brimming with books, research papers, manuscripts and other original and extremely rare material on Islam. Dr Hamidullah was the first Muslim to have translated the Holy Quran into French. This translation has run into about 20 editions.

His research in several languages on Hadith, the Islamic law, Islamic history and other related subjects is considered original, monumental and authentic. During his stay in France for about half a century, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of non-Muslims, mostly French, embraced Islam through his teachings.

Although common readers may not be aware of Dr Muhammad Hamidullah’s works and the value they carry, scholars have done some wonderful job to bring to light Hamidullah’s life and his works through their books and articles. For instance, Rashid Sheikh’s Dr Muhammad Hamid­ullah: Hayat, Khidmaat, Mak­toobaat (2014), Muhammad Alam Mukhtar-i-Haq’s Nigarishaat-i-Dr Hamidullah (2012) (in three volumes) and July-June 2004 issue of Maarif-e-Islami, a research journal published by Allama Iqbal Open University, have captured the most vital information on Dr Hamidullah’s contribution to research on Islam and his life.

Now Dr Rafiuddin Hashmi has come up with a collection of Dr Hamidullah’s hitherto unpublished letters. Titled Makateeb-i-Dr Muhammad Hamidullah and subtitled Banaam Muhammad Tufail (Paris), the book offers 76 letters that Dr Hamidullah wrote to Tufail. Muhammad Tufail was a friend of Hamidullah’s and a civil servant. To distinguish him from Muhammad Tufail, the celebrated editor of Nuqoosh, Lahore (who died in 1986), the word ‘Paris’ has been added to the title as Tufail, the civil servant, had settled in Paris after his retirement and died there in 2006.

Additionally, the book has an appendix that includes 26 letters written by Muhammad Tufail (Paris) to Dr Rafiuddin Hashmi and seven letters written by Abdur Rahman Bazmi to Muhammad Tufail (Paris). In addition to the facsimile of some letters the book offers the translation of Dr Hamidullah’s interview published in the January-March 2003 issue of Impact International, London.

Some of the letters included in the book carry invaluable information on history, Islam and related topics. Others offer some personal info and are evidence of Hamidullah’s unrelenting passion to serve Islam and Muslims. Tufail had written to Hashmi sahib that Hamidullah had spared everything for the service of Islam and Muslims in France. As put by Mirza Muhammad Munavver, Hamidullah had spent most of his adult life in acquiring knowledge and spreading it. Dr Muhammad Hamidullah died in the USA on December 17, 2002.

Published by Qirtas, Karachi, the book shows that letter-writing is a noble art and the old-fashioned letters have something to offer that emails don’t.

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Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2021

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The lost art of letter-writing

Handwriting; paper; letters: they are drifting from our lives. But there's something in the air, for three books this autumn are devoted to this trio of intertwined subjects: Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink ; Ian Sansom's Paper ; and John O'Connell 's For the Love of Letters . A sense of loss suffuses all these works (Sansom's book makes it plain with his subtitle, "an elegy"). But perhaps these books, this feeling, will spark a revival in the handling of the fountain pen and the wielding of the Basildon Bond. Perhaps it's like pastoral: a genre that could be invented only when the idea of the urban was fully established, Theocritus writing about nymphs and shepherds in the age of Alexandria. Passion can be proportionate to scarcity. Maybe we are ready to fall back in love with what O'Connell's book calls "slow communication".

Here is a full declaration of interest: O'Connell and I were at school together. We've known each other for 27 years. Last week I received a letter from him. On beautiful paper, but in Biro (he apologised, his daughter, he thought, might have appropriated the fountain pen). It was a wonderful letter: thanking me for dinner, yes, but also giving me some advice on a tricky work question, and in general showing that he'd thought about the conversations we'd had that night. This morning, I started reading his book. It begins by movingly describing a letter he received from a friend when his mother died last year. I read this with a guilty shock. I hadn't written to John then. Why not? At what point in my apparently well-brought-up life did I suddenly think it was OK not to write to a bereaved friend?

It wasn't always like this. Depending on what manner of hoarder O'Connell is, he might well turn up some Higgins juvenalia tucked away in a drawer somewhere. I'm pretty sure that if I rootled around in my bureau – where the letters-from-friends archive dries up in about 1997, around the time that email took off – I'd find letters from him, in his distinctive and elegant hand, the Ys rendered with looped tails, as you'd write a Greek gamma. (Philip Hensher, in his introduction to The Missing Ink, recalls realising he had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend, whom he'd known a decade, looked like. Knowing someone's handwriting – O'Connell's is as familiar to me as my own – can turn out to be a marker of a friendship's extreme longevity, at least for those of us whose adult lives began before the digital age.)

Funnily enough, though, in recent months, I have been writing letters. A friend of mine is very unwell. I haven't seen her for some time. At some point, I'm not sure why, I decided to start writing to her: with pen and paper. Partly, I think, as a tease – she's one of the least "analogue", most tech-savvie people I know. But also because I wanted her to feel that I was thinking about her in a personal way, and I wasn't sure that could adequately be conveyed by machine-made letterforms. Let's be clear, this is much more to do with me than her. She gets to plough through near illegible streams-of-consciousness written not on gorgeous Smythson (like John's letters) but rather on, at very best, Conqueror Laid (vellum) or at worst on hotel writing-paper or torn-out notebook leaves.

But still... O'Connell quotes this lovely passage from a piece by Catherine Field in the New York Times.

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

To John's letter, I replied by text. I said something like this: "Your letter was so wonderful I was almost tempted to strike up a correspondence". I have not written back, of course. Though, on the way back to the office to finish this post, I did find myself walking into the art-supplies shop round the corner, and buying a fountain pen ... something's changed.

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The New York Times

Opinionator | the death of letter-writing.

The Death of Letter-Writing

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

In recent years, a number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary letter. The publication of Saul Bellow’s letters in 2010 and William Styron’s last year were accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can expect. There was also no small amount of hand-wringing about how “The Collected Emails of Dave Eggers” (or whomever) will never cast quite the same spell.

These are legitimate concerns. But a less remarked upon and equally worrisome question is what the death of letter writing — and its replacement by emailing — is doing to the process of creative writing itself. Before the advent of email, many writers maintained a healthy relationship with their correspondence; they found letter writing to be a useful complement to their main literary projects. Letters were not only a way to stay in touch with colleagues or test out ideas and themes on the page, but also a valuable method of easing into and out of a state of mind where they could pursue more daunting and in-depth writing.

John Updike , for instance, often began his writing day by answering a letter or two. Cynthia Ozick has said that she does the same thing, answering letters after breakfast, before beginning her real work. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast, turned to his letters when his fiction wasn’t going well; they were a welcome break from what he called the “awful responsibility of writing.” Iris Murdoch worked on her fiction in the morning, wrote letters in the afternoon and then returned to her fiction for a couple hours in the early evening. Thomas Mann’s days followed much the same pattern: serious writing in the morning, then letters, reviews and newspaper articles in the evening.

For these writers, and many more like them, keeping up with their correspondence was a valuable para-literary activity — not quite “real” writing, but something that helped them warm up for or cool down from the task. (And, of course, it should go without saying that many of these letters were beautiful works of literature in their own right.)

This is not to say that all writers found dealing with their correspondence pleasant. H. L. Mencken replied to every letter he received on the same day that it arrived — out of politeness, he said, and also for more selfish reasons. “I answer letters promptly as a matter of self-defense,” Mencken once explained. “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”

Charles Darwin was similarly compulsive. He made a point of replying to every letter he received, even those from obvious cranks. If he failed to do so, it weighed on his conscience and could even keep him up at night.

Is email really such a different beast? I would argue that it is. I recently compiled a book about artists’ daily rituals, and as part of my research I spoke to several contemporary writers, painters and composers about their working habits. Nearly everyone was wary of the distractive potential of email. The novelist Nicholson Baker, for instance, told me that he tries to avoid checking email too early in the day because “it just does change everything. As soon as you have a couple of emails pending, the day has a different flavor.”

In a 2010 interview with The Paris Review, the novelist David Mitchell voiced a similar sentiment. He talked of “hearing the blip blip blip of emails arriving in your inbox, and knowing that at some point you’re going to have to sit down and sift through them, but not today, damn it, not tonight, please, not until I’ve just finished this one last scene.”

It is this constant background awareness of email that can cause real problems. Unlike traditional mail, email is always active. You can’t fire off an email and then put it completely out of mind; there is at least some slight awareness of the message’s continuing life, the possibility of a reply, the need to keep refreshing the stream of digital correspondence. And that’s the best-case scenario — more often, it is the nagging collection of unanswered emails that weighs on one’s mind.

So can contemporary writers — and nonwriters who are overwhelmed by email, i.e., pretty much everyone I know — take away any lessons from our literary ancestors’ less fraught relationship with correspondence? One possible tactic is to set aside a portion of each day for email and deal with it only at that time — to process email in batches, treating it like a daily delivery from the postman rather than a constant slow drip of communication.

I realize that this is not an entirely original suggestion, nor one that is likely to work for most people. An alternative is to adopt a habit that I have noticed in several especially busy editors and journalists, and it is simply this: Spend as little time as possible reading and replying to emails, and dash them off with as much haste, and as little care to spelling and punctuation, as you can bear. In other words, don’t think of them as letters at all — think of them as telegrams, and remember that you are paying for every word.

Mason Currey is the author of “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.”

What's Next

The lost art of writing letters — Michael's essay

Social Sharing

My millennial son is now a full member of The Handwritten Letter Appreciation Society (HLAS), headquartered in Swanage, Dorset, England. His membership number is 0117.

How and why he joined are something of a mystery, much like his ongoing obsession with expensive footwear and vigorous exercise.

The mission of the HLAS is of course to foster and promote sit-down, pen-written letters sent to friends, or even enemies.

I can't remember the last time I sat down with a pen and wrote a letter by hand to a friend. Postcards, yes; letters no. The last real handwritten letters, printed actually, might be when I handwrote letters to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

A blindingly obvious reason is my appalling penmanship. My handwriting is unreadable to me and anyone else.

For example, my day book says I'm scheduled to interview Mr. Ms. or Dr. S. Tzhitko in a few days. Have no idea who that is.

I have, over the years, written numerous letters on a portable typewriter, hoping to never have to inflict my penmanship on anyone ever again.

The idea of writing a letter to someone is infused with all kinds of reaffirming memories.

The love letter, for example. It's comforting to read the letters sent by lovers to each other in wartime.

Not just nostalgia drawing you in, but the personal partnership between you and the pen that formed the words.

Whoever heard of a touching series of love emails? And I hope we never do.

Letter-writing by hand takes work. More so than emails. You have to sit down, take pen in hand and think.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal once apologized for writing a very long letter to a friend, saying, "I didn't have time to write a short one."

Letters on paper, in an envelope, have a solidity to them that seems to suppress time. Or recover it. - Michael Enright

Working at it focuses the mind. In our screen-crazy world, the idea of a refreshing break from the vertiginous onslaught of digital dreck is very appealing.

Letters on paper, in an envelope, have a solidity to them that seems to suppress time. Or recover it.

For example, I was upset some months ago when a bundle of letters between myself and an early love was thrown away a few days after her death.

Recent studies have shown that penning a letter can in some weird way reduce stress (an aside, don't you just love sentences that begin: "Recent studies have shown ..."?)

Is it my imagination, but are the things of yesteryear, not just letter-writing, making a retro comeback?

My favourite used bookstore, for example, has set aside an entire section to vinyl LPs. It is always jammed. Vinyl stores are flourishing across the country.

Which is not to say that we are breathlessly waiting for the return of the rotary dial or Princess phones.

My eternal beloved gave me an old Smith-Corona portable recently, as an early Father's Day present.

As I sat down and began to type, the sound of the clacking of keys reminded me of early newspaper days and how young we all were.

I'm sending it out to get fixed.

There are hazards in looking to the past for recovered enthusiasms. Obviously you are open to charges of old fogeyism. People smile at you and say: "How quaint."

I'll take my chances. As the Peter Allen song Everything Old is New Again puts it: "Don't throw the past away. You might need it some other rainy day."

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Opinion: It’s time to bring back the lost art of letter writing

Berk Sievers

Despite mobile phones’ centrality to modern life, the art of letter writing ought to be reintroduced and seized upon. Handwritten letters. A simple but enchanting gesture of communication utilized in “the old days.” Sadly, today’s society blatantly chooses to disregard the use of letters and would rather text. Letter writing is a dying art — considering the vogue and innovative edge of present-day communication techniques over traditional methods. 

Yes, letter writing may be a tedious task, yet it’s a wonderful gesture for the recipient. Frankly, letter writing provokes thoughtfulness and reflectiveness to decide how one wants to open up or send the message. Handwritten letters remain a personal artifact that usually blossoms into an appreciative, highly cherished memory.

People comprehend the effort and work that goes into composing letters and they will always be more appreciated than emails or texts. If it’s a love letter, a fellowship letter, or a get-well-soon letter, letters are out of the ordinary and will forever be kept and remembered.

Not only can you write someone you care about a wonderful letter, but also stick in a photograph or a tissue covered in your perfume. There are many ways we can show our affection and love for family and friends — letters one can reread over and over again — with text that’s not possible.

In today’s chaotic world it is vital for humanity to communicate on a more intimate level. One way to do that is by grabbing yourself a pen and paper, deciding who you want to write to, writing, bringing it to the post office and mailing it.

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Seven Reasons to Reclaim the Lost Art of Letter Writing

Handwritten correspondences, cards, and notes all deserve to make a comeback now more than ever.

When dropped in the mailbox, it's the surprise, excitement, and gratitude that comes from receiving a handwritten letter that's absolutely immeasurable. Today, however, you might say that letter writing has become nothing more than a lost art . With technology at our fingertips, any love letter, thank-you note, or birthday card can be condensed down to a short text or email.

But a handwritten letter can convey what technology simply can't—from the choice of paper to the type of card, the color ink of the pen to the postage used on the envelope, and even the beauty of each letter coming together to form a word on the page , writing a letter is an incredibly personal experience. And whether you're the writer or the reader, a handwritten note sent in the mail can help articulate feelings you never knew you had. For these reasons and more, we make the case for reviving the tradition of letter writing. They're sure to make you pick up some beautiful stationery , a swanky pen, and practice that cursive once and for all.

Handwritten letters are personal.

"In a digital world, where it can take five seconds to send an email or WhatsApp, there is something incredibly human and personal about getting a handwritten letter or card," says Robert Van Den Bergh, director at Scribeless . "A hand-addressed envelope with a real stamp and luxury note inside is very tactile. One of the oldest forms of communication, handwriting is innately human."

Handwriting is a stress reliever.

"The experience of writing a handwritten letter has been shown to relieve stress and is a really calming process," notes Van Den Bergh. With so much time spent working and staring at screens , it's important to find outlets that allow us to let go. Much like exercise and meditation , writing offers the opportunity to exercise different parts of our physical and mental states.

It's an opportunity for creativity and self-expression.

"Similar to calligraphy, everyone has their own handwriting style and although some are more beautiful than others, there is something very experiential about getting a letter, card or note," explains Van Den Bergh. It's also an opportunity to embrace right-brain thinking, allowing your creativity to influence how you write, what you write, how you read, and how you interpret the words.

Handwritten letters provide you the gift of time.

In our fast-paced world, we could all use an opportunity to slow down . Whether writing a handwritten letter or reading one, you take your eyes off the screen and engage your eyes and brain in a new way that requires attention and thoughtfulness. "A handwritten card, letter or postcard is significantly more engaging than an email or message," says Van Den Bergh. "Scientifically, you spend much more time reading a handwritten note because you cannot skim it in the same way you can a font on a screen."

You can build relationships and further connect with people.

There's an element of deeper connection when sharing a handwritten letter. The choice to write it, the time it takes, and the message inside create a shared experience that is intimate and meaningful. Despite the digital world offering us the opportunity to connect with people we otherwise couldn't—such as in the form of video chats, and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram— studies show that almost half of us feel lonely and isolated.

They have more value than a digital letter.

Unlike a text or email, handwritten letters offer both physical and emotional value that doesn't go unnoticed by the receiver. You can hold a letter in your hands, smell it, display it, share it, and store it. And because they're often unexpected or occasional, they're associated with delight. "Most people believe that handwritten letters are a nostalgic communication method, which is primarily used by older generations," adds Van Den Bergh. "However, we have found that younger people actually engage with handwritten letters more and we believe that this is because it is something that younger people mostly receive when at Christmas and on birthdays . They therefore associate it with receiving a gift, subconsciously giving it more value."

Letters are historical artifacts.

How many emails do you get a day? How many texts do you send and receive? And how many do you delete or allow to get buried beneath piles of new messages, never to be seen again? Handwritten letters have a type of meaning that don't allow you to simply click "delete." A tangible paper copy lives in real life, begging you to hold onto it, reread it for years to come, and paint a picture with every word. The letter and the thoughts stand still in time—to hold onto what life was like all that time ago .

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Ielts vocabulary: writing task 2.

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

A lot of people find it difficult to write letters and often avoid doing so altogether. Letter writing is a dying art.

Do you agree with this statement?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Read the following essay. Complete the answer by filling the gaps with an expression or word from the box below.

It is true that many people struggle to produce letters and often avoid writing letters completely. I don't agree that this skill is gradually disappearing.

let us consider the reasons why people find it so difficult to write. To begin with, writing letters is less frequent nowadays thanks to modern technology. These days we are much more likely to email someone than write a letter. our business communications have become more informal than in the past. a less formal style of writing is more acceptable. Other forms of modern communication text messaging have reduced our writing skills even further.

I still feel that letter writing is an important skill to learn there are many parts of the world where it is very important to be formal. This is true if you are involved in international business. globalisation, the business world is becoming more and more international and it is not always possible to pick up the telephone to talk to people. I believe that letter writing will never die out completely. And, even though these letters may be written on computers rather than by hand, we still need to learn and practise this skill.

To sun up, even though many people think writing letters is quite difficult, there are things they can do to improve their writing skills if they find it too difficult. Personally, I believe that if you want to make a good impression in any situation, then you need good writing skills.

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The Greeting

Depending on the style and aim of the letter, you will need to adapt your greeting.

Always start an informal letter in the ways:

• Dear + name
• Hi / Hello + name

‘Dear...’ is more appropriate, so stick with this.

For a formal letter there are two options for the greeting:

• Use Dear Sir or Madam if you don’t know the name of the person you are writing to.
• Use Dear + surname if you do know their name, e.g. Dear Mr Smith or Dear Mrs Jones.

Discover more tips in The Ultimate Guide to Get a Target Band Score of 7+ » — a book that's free for 🚀 Premium users.

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a lot of people find it difficult to write letters and often avoid doing so altogether. letter writing is a dying art.do you agree with this statement?

IELTS essay a lot of people find it difficult to write letters and often avoid doing so altogether. letter writing is a dying art.

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Guest Essay

José Andrés: Let People Eat

By José Andrés

Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen.

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

José Andrés is a chef and the founder of World Central Kitchen.

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