How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters).

by Mary Owens Crowther.

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS A LETTER?

It is not so long since most personal letters, after an extremely formal salutation, began "I take my pen in hand." We do not see that so much nowadays, but the spirit lingers. Pick up the average letter and you cannot fail to discover that the writer has grimly taken his pen in hand and, filled with one thought, has attacked the paper. That one thought is to get the thing over with.

And perhaps this att.i.tude of getting the thing over with at all costs is not so bad after all. There are those who lament the pa.s.sing of the ceremonious letter and others who regret that the "literary" letter--the kind of letter that can be published--is no longer with us. But the old letter of ceremony was not really more useful than a powdered wig, and as for the sort of letter that delights the heart and lightens the labor of the biographer--well, that is still being written by the kind of person who can write it. It is better that a letter should be written because the writer has something to say than as a token of culture.

Some of the letters of our dead great do too often remind us that they were not forgetful of posterity.

The average writer of a letter might well forget culture and posterity and address himself to the task in hand, which, in other than the most exceptional sort of letter, is to say what he has to say in the shortest possible compa.s.s that will serve to convey the thought or the information that he wants to hand on. For a letter is a conveyance of thought; if it becomes a medium of expression it is less a letter than a diary fragment.

Most of our letters in these days relate to business affairs or to social affairs that, as far as personality is concerned, might as well be business. Our average letter has a rather narrow objective and is not designed to be literature. We may, it is true, write to cheer up a sick friend, we may write to tell about what we are doing, we may write that sort of missive which can be cla.s.sified only as a love letter--but unless such letters come naturally it is better that they be not written. They are the exceptional letters. It is absurd to write them according to rule. In fact, it is absurd to write any letter according to rule. But one can learn the best usage in correspondence, and that is all that this book attempts to present.

The heyday of letter writing was in the eighteenth century in England.

George Saintsbury, in his interesting "A Letter Book," says:

"By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and decadence--French and English--the very palmiest day of the art.

Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male s.e.x, Horace Walpole, Gray, and Cowper--belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'--our most famous she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is hardly more remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this time is not really more important than the abundance, variety, and popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the 'letter-writingest' of ages from almost every point of view. In its least as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if not into poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on cla.s.sical models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in England more modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_, started the fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no thought of print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame d'Arblay's good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and historian like Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till Victorian times, if then."

There is a wide distinction between a letter and an epistle. The letter is a subst.i.tute for a spoken conversation. It is spontaneous, private, and personal. It is non-literary and is not written for the eyes of the general public. The epistle is in the way of being a public speech--an audience is in mind. It is written with a view to permanence. The relation between an epistle and a letter has been compared to that between a Platonic dialogue and a talk between two friends. A great man's letters, on account of their value in setting forth the views of a school or a person, may, if produced after his death, become epistles.

Some of these, genuine or forgeries, under some eminent name, have come down to us from the days of the early Roman Empire. Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, are the princ.i.p.al names to which these epistles, genuine and pseudonymous, are attached.

Some of the letters of Cicero are rather epistles, as they were intended for the general reader.

The ancient world--Babylonia, a.s.syria, Egypt, Rome, and Greece--figures in our inheritance of letters. In Egypt have been discovered genuine letters. The papyrus discoveries contain letters of unknowns who had no thought of being read by the general public.

During the Renaissance, Cicero's letters were used as models for one of the most common forms of literary effort. There is a whole literature of epistles from Petrarch to the _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_. These are, to some degree, similar to the Epistles of Martin Marprelate.

Later epistolary satires are Pascal's "Provincial Letters," Swift's "Drapier Letters," and the "Letters of Junius."

Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter writing as an art upon a considerable scale.

Modern journalism uses a form known as the "open letter" which is really an epistle.

But we are not here concerned with the letter as literature.

CHAPTER II

THE PURPOSE OF THE LETTER

No one can go far wrong in writing any sort of letter if first the trouble be taken to set out the exact object of the letter. A letter always has an object--otherwise why write it? But somehow, and particularly in the dictated letter, the object frequently gets lost in the words. A handwritten letter is not so apt to be wordy--it is too much trouble to write. But a man dictating may, especially if he be interrupted by telephone calls, ramble all around what he wants to say and in the end have used two pages for what ought to have been said in three lines. On the other hand, letters may be so brief as to produce an impression of abrupt discourtesy. It is a rare writer who can say all that need be said in one line and not seem rude. But it can be done.

The single purpose of a letter is to convey thought. That thought may have to do with facts, and the further purpose may be to have the thought produce action. But plainly the action depends solely upon how well the thought is transferred. Words as used in a letter are vehicles for thought, but every word is not a vehicle for thought, because it may not be the kind of word that goes to the place where you want your thought to go; or, to put it another way, there is a wide variation in the understanding of words. The average American vocabulary is quite limited, and where an exactly phrased letter might completely convey an exact thought to a person of education, that same letter might be meaningless to a person who understands but few words. Therefore, it is fatal in general letter writing to venture into unusual words or to go much beyond the vocabulary of, say, a grammar school graduate.

Statistics show that the ordinary adult in the United States--that is, the great American public--has either no high school education or less than a year of it. You can a.s.sume in writing to a man whom you do not know and about whom you have no information that he has only a grammar school education and that in using other than commonplace words you run a double danger--first, that he will not know what you are talking about or will misinterpret it; and second, that he will think you are trying to be highfalutin and will resent your possibly quite innocent parade of language.

In a few very effective sales letters the writers have taken exactly the opposite tack. They have slung language in the fashion of a circus publicity agent, and by their verbal gymnastics have attracted attention. This sort of thing may do very well in some kinds of circular letters, but it is quite out of place in the common run of business correspondence, and a comparison of the sales letters of many companies with their day-to-day correspondence shows clearly the need for more attention to the day-to-day letter. A sales letter may be bought. A number of very competent men make a business of writing letters for special purposes. But a higher tone in general correspondence cannot be bought and paid for. It has to be developed. A good letter writer will neither insult the intelligence of his correspondent by making the letter too childish, nor will he make the mistake of going over his head. He will visualize who is going to receive his letter and use the kind of language that seems best to fit both the subject matter and the reader, and he will give the fitting of the words to the reader the first choice.

There is something of a feeling that letters should be elegant--that if one merely expresses oneself simply and clearly, it is because of some lack of erudition, and that true erudition breaks out in great, sonorous words and involved constructions. There could be no greater mistake. The man who really knows the language will write simply. The man who does not know the language and is affecting something which he thinks is culture has what might be called a sense of linguistic insecurity, which is akin to the sense of social insecurity. Now and again one meets a person who is dreadfully afraid of making a social error. He is afraid of getting hold of the wrong fork or of doing something else that is not done. Such people labor along frightfully. They have a perfectly vile time of it, but any one who knows social usage takes it as a matter of course. He observes the rules, not because they are rules, but because they are second nature to him, and he shamelessly violates the rules if the occasion seems to warrant it. It is quite the same with the letter.

One should know his ground well enough to do what one likes, bearing in mind that there is no reason for writing a letter unless the objective is clearly defined. Writing a letter is like shooting at a target. The target may be hit by accident, but it is more apt to be hit if careful aim has been taken.

CHAPTER III

THE PARTS OF A LETTER

The mechanical construction of a letter, whether social, friendly, or business, falls into six or seven parts. This arrangement has become established by the best custom. The divisions are as follows:

1. Heading 2. Inside address (Always used in business letters but omitted in social and friendly letters) 3. Salutation 4. Body 5. Complimentary close 6. Signature 7. Superscription

1. THE HEADING

The heading of a letter contains the street address, city, state, and the date. The examples below will ill.u.s.trate:

2018 Calumet Street or 1429 Eighth Avenue Chicago, Ill. New York, N.Y.

May 12, 1921 March 8, 1922

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the business letterhead appear the name of the firm, its address, and the kind of business engaged in]

When the heading is typewritten or written by hand, it is placed at the top of the first letter sheet close to the right-hand margin. It should begin about in the center, that is, it should extend no farther to the left than the center of the page. If a letter is short and therefore placed in the center of a page, the heading will of course be lower and farther in from the edge than in a longer letter. But it should never be less than an inch from the top and three quarters of an inch from the edge.

In the business letterhead appear the name of the firm, its address, and the kind of business engaged in. The last is often omitted in the case of widely known firms or where the nature of the business is indicated by the name of the firm.

In the case of a printed or engraved letterhead, the written heading should consist only of the date. The printed date-line is not good. To mix printed and written or typed characters detracts from the neat appearance of the letter.

In social stationery the address, when engraved, should be about three quarters of an inch from the top of the sheet, either in the center or at the right-hand corner. When the address is engraved, the date may be written at the end of the last sheet, from the left-hand corner, directly after the signature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Letterheads used by a life insurance company, a law firm, and three a.s.sociations]

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the case of widely known firms, or where the name of the firm itself indicates it, reference to the nature of the business is often omitted from letterheads]

2. THE INSIDE ADDRESS