On Correspondence

The letter is dead. The email is dying. What remains is the text message, which is to correspondence what a grunt is to conversation, and I will confess that of all the losses your era has sustained, and they are numerous, this is the one I feel most keenly.

A man of my time wrote letters. He wrote them frequently, he wrote them with care, and he understood that a letter was not merely a conveyance of information but a representation of himself, set down in ink, sent out into the world, and liable to be kept, re-read, and judged long after the moment of its composition had passed. The quality of his paper mattered. The clarity of his hand mattered. The structure of his thoughts mattered, because a letter, unlike speech, could not be retracted, softened, or explained away with a gesture. It was permanent, and the knowledge of its permanence imposed a discipline upon the writer that improved not only his correspondence but his thinking.

You will tell me that email serves the same purpose, and in theory you would be correct, but in practice the speed and ease of the medium have stripped it of nearly everything that made letter writing valuable. Men compose emails as they would speak, which is to say carelessly, beginning without a proper salutation, proceeding without structure, and closing without courtesy. They send them before they have finished thinking, which means the recipient receives not a considered communication but the first draft of a thought, complete with its errors, its unnecessary length, and its tone of breathless informality. The subject line, when it exists at all, bears no useful relation to the content. The signature, if present, is an automated block of text that no one has reviewed since the day it was created.

Begin with a salutation. Not “Hey” and not the bare first name sitting alone like an accusation. “Dear” is not archaic; it is correct, and if it feels too formal for the relationship, then “Good morning” or “Good afternoon” will do, though I note that neither is improved by the addition of an exclamation mark, which your era scatters through its correspondence like confetti at a wedding where no one has thought to sweep the floor.

State your purpose early. A correspondent who requires three paragraphs to arrive at his point has not been thorough; he has been inconsiderate, for he is spending the reader’s time rather than his own, and the exchange is not equitable. Say what you mean. Provide what context is necessary. Ask what you need to ask. Then stop.

I am informed that there now exist machines, artificial intelligences as you call them, which will compose your emails for you, and I confess that my feelings on the subject are more complicated than I should like them to be. On the one hand, the notion that a man cannot be trusted to write his own correspondence is so thoroughly dispiriting that I would prefer not to dwell upon it. On the other hand, I have read enough of your unaided correspondence to acknowledge that the machine may, in many cases, produce something measurably better than what the man would have produced on his own, and I am not so proud as to deny an improvement simply because its source offends me. If you must use such a tool, use it as one might use training wheels on a bicycle, which is to say temporarily, and with the firm intention of learning to do the thing yourself. Let the machine show you what a properly structured email looks like, then write the next one without assistance, and the one after that, and so on until the skill is yours and the machine is no longer necessary. A gentleman who relies permanently upon an artificial intelligence to conduct his correspondence is not corresponding at all; he is delegating his personality, and the people who receive his messages, if they are at all perceptive, will eventually notice that they are speaking to a machine and will adjust their regard for him accordingly.

Close your emails. “Best regards” is serviceable. “Kind regards” is warmer. “Yours” is sufficient among friends. “Best” alone is the laziest acceptable option, and I use the word acceptable with considerable reluctance. Do not close with “Cheers” unless you are holding a drink, and do not close with “Sent from my iPhone,” which is not a closing but an excuse, and a poor one at that.

The principles of good correspondence have not changed in a century, only the medium and the willingness to observe them. Write clearly. Write with courtesy. Write as though the person reading your words deserves the three additional minutes it would have taken you to get them right. They almost certainly do.