April is National Card and Letter Writing Month. How many of you have written someone by hand this month? And how many times? Don’t worry, Etiquetteer is not here to chastise, but to encourage. The Lovely Note you send will unquestionably lift the spirits of its recipient.
Obviously email and text-messaging have changed the way we communicate permanently. So how well has older advice about written communication survived? Etiquetteer has greatly enjoyed leafing through two tiny old books to see: The Ladies’ and Gentlemens’ Letter-Writer, and Guide to Polite Behavior (1863) and The Etiquette of Letter Writing (1927). Both of them still have very useful nuggets of guidance, but 21st-century readers may feel like they’re panning for gold as they search through very long sentences.
“An acquaintance with the common forms of letter writing, is of such university necessity, that no person can transact business with satisfaction or decency, without some knowledge of them,” begins the former rather turgidly. In this century we’d say “Knowing how to write a letter correctly will help you be universally understood in the business world.” But it’s still true.
Spelling is one area in which we have not been helped by technology. The Letter-Writer’s 1863 advice still holds: “We would advise those who cannot fully depend on their memory for the spelling, to . . . practice with a good spelling dictionary at their hand; and carefully correct what they have written by the book; in this way they will soon, with care, be able to attain great perfection.” Now we have spell check and Grammarly, but Etiquetteer thinks too many people allow those tools to substitute for their brains instead of enhance them.
Style is something both books discuss, but while The Letter-Writer confines its advice to adopting a style suitable to one’s topic (“. . . letters of business ought to be as concise as they possibly can be made . . . Letters of friendship . . . ought to be in a more free and easy style,” etc.), Etiquetteer was surprised to see The Etiquette of Letter Writing acknowledging how tastes, and manners, change. “. . . conventions change when custom itself has sanctioned some simpler, clearer method of expression or when perhaps a more gracious manner of personalizing the all too cold engraved form has suggested itself. In our hurried days* graciousness is all too rare, but its rarity gives it increased importance and makes it doubly welcome.” But the author quickly goes on to exempt the most formal forms of invitation from individual interpretation. “There is nothing that excuses any display of individuality in such cases; it is merely a sign of ignorance and bad taste.”
So thank goodness we are concerned specifically with letter writing today, and not formal invitations! Which leads to a final word on punctuation, as important today as it was in 1863. “Punctuation is of very great importance in perspicuity in composition, as it is necessary to the proper divisions of sentences, which, without being so divided might be ambiguous, unintelligible, or convey ideas totally different from those of the writer.” Lynne Truss handled that dilemma memorably in her 2003 book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The necessity of a comma is sharply demonstrated by comparing “Let’s eat, Grandma,” with “Let’s eat Grandma.”
Etiquetteer wishes you joy and confidence as you put pen to paper this month.
*This was written 95 years ago!