When did you last sit down and write a letter? Write not type. Have you ever sat down and written a letter?
Writing letters, sending messages, keeping in touch….. there are so many different ways to do it.
Sadly, most of the 21st Century methods have lost the personal touch that came with a handwritten letter.
Since I was a little girl, I’ve had “pen friends”, some sourced via my mum’s magazine and some from a list we were given in school. At around the age of nine, I remember sitting down at the kitchen table with my mum’s blue airmail pad of paper, with the lined template slotted in between the thin sheets and writing to a little girl in S Africa. My mum warned me to not to write too much, not to use too many sheets of the flimsy blue paper as postage was expensive.
I’ve long since lost contact with that person but over the years have had several other “pen friends.” I am still in contact with three of them from around the world that I have written to for about thirty years.
But, when did I even last sit down and write a letter to any of them? Honest answer is that I have no idea! We still exchange Christmas and birthday cards but even these are dwindling as the years move on. Normal “catch ups” are now via FB messenger.
The art of letter writing (and I’m excluding business letters and complaint letters here) is dying.
Let’s try an experiment.
Look at your mobile/cell phone and the various apps you have available to you. Excluding actually making a phone call, how many different ways could you get a message to someone? Go on, count them.
I’ve just counted – ten!
Communicating with each other has never been easier! Add in video calling/Skype and the number increases here.
So, do we make full use of this functionality? Do we make best use of our language skills while messaging others?
That’s a debatable point but, if the content of most of the messages I receive is anything to go by, they are short on words and riddled with emojis and gifs.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with these. A lot of them are quite cute or are rather humorous but do they really convey the emotions that you are trying to impart? Can they be mis-interpreted? …….. Most definitely!
Can an emoji really say what you would previously have said in a sentence or two?
Think about it….
Think about it the next time you are about to hit “send” on a message that contains no words at all…… 😉
Coral McCallum 