The personal letter is, in many respects, an endangered species. It may be difficult for people born after, say, 1975 to imagine how much time earlier generations spent writing letters to one another. Not just before there were telephones, but, in fact, for many years after the telephone was invented, before it became relatively cheap and easy to make long-distance and international calls, people who wanted to communicate but lived too far apart to speak face to face had no choice but to send letters to one another. Nowadays, in most countries of the world, everyday communications rely on electronics. Almost all of us have a cell phone in a purse or pocket, a telephone in our home, and access to a computer that enables us to send e-mails. When it comes to choosing a method of contacting friends and acquaintances, letter writing comes a long way down the list of options.From the point of view of a writer, it is perhaps regrettable that the writing of personal letters is in decline. Sitting down to describe events, pass on your views and comments, or indeed open your heart in a letter to a friend or acquaintance was an everyday act that epitomized the whole writing process—the withdrawal from everyday goings-on, the concentration on a blank sheet of paper that had to be filled, the attempt to connect imaginatively across space with another person. In this way, writing letters provided an excellent opportunity for the budding writer to practice his or her skills. It may be possible to derive similar benefit from writing e-mails, but the electronic environment in which e-mail writing takes place and the very fact that e-mail is a medium designed for speed seem to militate against a writer's devoting the amount of time and care to the writing of a personal message that he or she would give to other writing tasks.E-mail is still a relatively new form of modern communication, but since it is almost universally available, easy to use, cheap, and, above all, quick, it has caught on extremely rapidly. Millions of e-mails now shoot back and forth across the world. E-mail has, perhaps, shifted the balance back slightly in favor of written communications after a decade or two in which the telephone was the average person's medium of choice for fast contact. But those who see the advent of e-mail as heralding the rebirth of the personal letter are probably overoptimistic.Nothing, probably, is going to bring back the personal letter. This does not mean that no letters are written or, to put it more broadly, that nothing is written in letter form. Nor does it mean that letter-writing skills have become irrelevant. Nor should the comment in the previous paragraph be taken as implying that e-mail is not or cannot be used for important communications. A great deal of the serious business of life is still transacted by means of the written word. Companies and similar organizations write to one another, to their customers or members, and to the general public. People in certain kinds of jobs must spend a large part of their workday preparing written communications. Such communications may be produced by word-processing software or e-mail programs and sent through cyberspace rather than by the mail, but, generally speaking, the same conventions apply to their writing, however they happen to be transmitted. For convenience, the first part of this chapter will generally refer to the documents it discusses as "letters," but it should be understood that what is said about a letter also applies to a formal e-mail used, for instance, to make an inquiry or place an order.Because we no longer use letters for everyday communication with family and friends, a letter today is quite likely to be a relatively important document with, in the broadest sense, some businesslike purpose: applying for a job, complaining about a product or service, or expressing an opinion to a newspaper editor, for example. Furthermore, because we are unaccustomed to writing them, every letter we now have to write is more of an effort and a trial. Even people at work whose daily jobs do not involve producing large amounts of correspondence may find writing a letter something of a challenge. A lot may depend on a letter, and yet we may be altogether unprepared to meet the challenge of putting together such an important document.The sections of this chapter are intended to help with any difficulties that writing letters or e-mails may present. For the reasons given above, the particular types of letter and e-mail dealt with are mainly of a business type—both the kind that a business writes to other businesses and the kind that private citizens write to organizations. Let us begin with an examination of the basic principles that apply to the writing of letters or formal (letter-type) e-mails.The BasicsA letter or a letter-type e-mail is, essentially, no different from any other piece of writing. It requires planning, drafting, and revising. It may even require research. The same rules of style apply to it as to other texts. It should also be adapted in tone and style to the reader it is intended for.Most letters should be kept short and to the point. An exception might be made for personal letters—a friend might perhaps love to hear you ramble on or follow you as you catch thoughts on the wing and develop them haphazardly, and perhaps we can never have enough from someone we love or enough of news from home. But, if we accept that personal letters are now a rarity, and that letters are mainly written in a business context, then they ought to be businesslike. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote some 350 years ago: "I have made this letter longer than usual only because I have not had the time to make it shorter." This may sound paradoxical, but it will, hopefully, not seem so to readers who have taken to heart this book's comments on the need to revise work of whatever kind and its suggestions that revision often involves editing, shortening, and sharpening up an earlier draft.Some letters are means of self-expression, such as letters written to newspapers or magazines to air our views on particular subjects or share our feelings with other readers. Some are means of self-presentation or even of self-advertisement. It is not uncommon for companies and institutions to request an application letter when seeking employment, sometimes handwritten, because it enables them to make a basic assessment of you, the applicant. In particular, it enables them to find out whether you are literate and whether you possess essential communications skills. Do not dash off a letter, or any kind of communication, that could be used as evidence, so to speak, for or against you. Treat the writing of a letter or a formal e-mail as a serious writing task, take time to plan and prepare, and allow yourself a reasonable amount of time to edit and correct. (This does not mean simply using the spell-checker after having written your document on the computer. Spell-checkers are not designed to distinguish sense from nonsense. If you write Were are you going too? your spell-checker will not object in the least.)Whatever the purpose of your letter or e-mail, it will stand a better chance of being read carefully and given the proper attention if it is neatly presented. Make sure that it looks tidy on the page. The secret of tidy presentation is a skillful and generous use of space. Leave adequate margins around your text. Insert a line space between each paragraph. Use 1.5 or double spacing if the font you are using looks at all cramped with single line spacing. Further, choose a type of font and a point size that will ensure that your letter is easily legible. Fancy fonts, especially fonts that imitate handwriting, are not always immediately clear.
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