When You Write a Letter

Front matter

When You Write a Letter

Some Suggestions as to Why, When, and How It Should Be Done

By THOMAS ARKLE CLARK Dean of Men and Professor of Rhetoric University of Illinois

Letter-writing

This little volume is not to be a textbook; it is not even to be a "Ready Letter Writer" with illustrations of how to present an offer of marriage to a young woman, how to get a kitchen range from a mail-order house, or how to compose a letter that will have "pull" and get the big business. It is simply a friendly suggestive personal talk between you and me on the subject of writing letters of all sorts, good form and its importance, the effect of the unexpected, and the latent social and business possibilities of the art. I am going to tell you, in a very personal way, some of the things I have learned through thirty years of experience and observation in writing social and friendly and business letters to all sorts of men, in trying to teach high school students and college undergraduates how to write acceptable letters, and in waiting for months and years for the letter which was expected but which never came.

There was a time, not far beyond the memory of some who are still living, when letter-writing was a very precise art, prac- ticed with scrupulous care and at long intervals, and demanding discriminating thought. Even in my own childhood, which is not a very remote period as history goes, I recall that the writing of a letter was not a task to be undertaken lightly, or accomplished without considerable serious preparation. It was analogous to preparing for threshers or getting ready to entertain the minister; all the family had a part in it and no one was allowed to shirk his duty.

Once a year a letter was written to our relatives in northern England. This letter was carefully, thoughtfully, and, I might almost say, prayerfully done. There were no misspellings of "received" or "accommodate," no sentences without subjects or verbs, no constructions whose grammatical parentage was in question, no careless illegible penmanship, no omission of vital and necessary details. The writing was like copper plate, the items of news were sifted and carefully thought out. Even though my father, who did the writing, had had little formal training in the subtle art of composition, this letter would have borne the cold scrutiny of a doctor of philosophy teaching freshman composition in college. I think father would have been given an A. The reply which came six months later was equally irreproachable, and had been the subject of equal care by our English relatives.

One has only to read the books written a century or more ago to see how great a part letter-writing played in the best literature extant. The shelves of our libraries are full of illustrations of the fact that many great writers have done some of their best work in the letters written to their friends. Richardson's first novel—the first work in English, in fact, to be worthy of the name of novel—was a series of letters written in the stiff formal style of the eighteenth century. Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son can scarcely be matched in the essays of any great writer of his time, for their delightful refined literary style, their keen insight into human nature, their truthful depicting of the thought and customs of the day. In our own time the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson are as representative of that writer's charm and genius as anything else that he has written, and many another modern writer has shown how effective informal letters can be.

In the olden days letter-writing was not so commonly practiced as now. Relatively few letters were written, and these few were not done thoughtlessly. There were good reasons for this. The cost of sending letters was excessive, and economy was of necessity practiced more rigidly than now; a dollar was seldom spent without deliberation. The writing and sending of a letter was a matter to be weighed carefully before it should be undertaken. To get a letter was a great event to be looked forward to with interest and pleasure and to be remembered and spoken of to the neighbors long afterward. Letters were passed around from one person to another and regarded with a respect and a consideration which we today, whose mail is crowded with all sorts of communications, can hardly understand.

I recall a story which my mother used to tell of the time in England when the postage used to be paid upon the receipt of the letter. A shrewd servant girl and her brother, both very poor, devised the scheme of sending communications to each other through certain hieroglyphics drawn upon the envelope, which supposedly contained the letter which one had written to the other. When either received this letter from the hand of the postman, he looked at it for a moment, deciphered the message upon the outside, and then gave it back, with the statement that, though he would like very much to get the letter, the postage demanded was beyond his means. It was such practices as just described, it is said, that led Rowland Hill to work for penny postage in England.

Changing business and social conditions, the reduction of postage, inventions, the introduction of stenography and typewriting have revolutionized letter-writing and in many ways have taken away from it its charm and its personal flavor. Now every one writes letters and every one gets them. We write letters as thoughtlessly and as carelessly as we use the telephone or go to the movies. It makes as little impression on us to get a letter as it does to see an automobile or an airplane. The morning mail brings me communications from wash women asking me to help them collect their bills, and from college presidents inquiring how to eliminate hazing, or to discourage Theta Nu Epsilon, and one has in it about as much individuality as the other. Usually both of them are typewritten, for the college president has a stenographer and the laundress has a daughter in high school who uses a typewriter.

We write ten letters now where we wrote one fifty years ago. It is the way we do business, it is the way we keep in touch with our friends, and perform our social obligations. Ultimately we shall pay a social call by writing a letter. Perhaps we shall hear our sermons by correspondence. But the increase in the number of letters we write has not improved our epistolary style; it has on the contrary made our writing more mechanical, less intimate, less personal and individual. If we have a stenographer she assumes all responsibility for our spelling, our punctuation, our sentence structure, and in fact for everything else excepting the bald business facts which our letters contain.

"How do you spell 'ammonia'?" I heard one of his employees ask a business man not long ago.

"I don't know anything about spelling or grammar," was his reply. "That's my stenographer's business. I simply tell her what to say and she fixes it up all right." I had had enough letters from him, however, to know that his stenographer was quite as deeply immersed in orthographic and grammatical darkness as was he himself, and that he was blissfully in ignorance of the fact.

Stenography has done a great deal to facilitate and accelerate letter-writing, but in many ways it has injured and cheapened the art. Very few men dictate as they talk. They fall into a conventional mechanical style, often verbose, and usually abrupt and lacking in grace and rhythm. It is pretty hard to talk cleverly into a dictaphone or to extemporize mellifluous phrases to a man fingering a stenotype. Some men can give a personal human touch to a dictated letter, but the number is limited. Dictated letters are infrequently planned with much care, and such a letter usually contains more words and says less than a letter written by hand. The limitations of time in writing a letter in longhand give opportunity for thought and discrimination in the choice of words and induces brevity and directness of expression. One has not time to say as much when writing longhand as when dictating, and so chooses his phrases and his ideas more carefully, plans his ideas more thoughtfully, and says more effectively what he has to say.

I was to make an after-dinner speech not long ago, and while I was dressing, my wife, who is naturally interested in my postprandial success, asked.

"What are you going to say tonight?"

"I haven't the least idea," I replied truthfully, trusting in Providence, as most men do in such a situation, that something clever would come into my mind at the last minute.

"Oh, dear," she exclaimed, with a sort of hopeless note in her voice, "you'll talk a long time then." And it is as true of writing as it is of speech that the man who makes no preparation, who "takes his pen in hand" with no definite plan in his mind when he begins to write is likely to wander on for a long time without getting anywhere.

I think we all realize the possibilities of letter writing as a business asset, but perhaps only when immediate business is in sight. In a moment of thoughtlessness I confided in a friend not long ago my intention shortly to buy a motor car. He, lacking something to talk about, disclosed the information to a second friend, who had a connection with the automobile business. Then the news spread, and at once my mail became heavy with letters. Most of these were circular letters devised cunningly to imitate typewriting, and so phrased as to seem like a personal appeal to me; but the disguise was thin and most of them went into the wastepaper basket without my even reading them to the end. I hate the multigraphed letter—it never deceives even an infant. I feel about it as I do when an acquaintance says to me, "Drop around and take dinner with us any time." His invitation has nothing personal or definite in it and is not one I should think of accepting. It makes no intimate appeal.

One of the letters, however, did interest me because it was personal, and it came from a man who had previously shown some interest in me. He had written me once when I was ill or had performed some service that had attracted his attention, a letter he was in no way under obligation to write; he had done so purely from courtesy. The letter that he wrote me this time was not a stock letter, but one that recognized me as an individual with some personal idiosyncrasies, with needs and tastes different from those of other individuals. I replied to his letter, and there is every indication that I shall buy his car, and I hold that in writing me the courteous, unsolicited, and unselfish note when he had no business axe to grind he played his business cards with the greatest finesse. He had my ear at once when he wanted to do business with me. He had learned, as many business men have not, I am sorry to say, that there are many letters besides the purely business letter that ultimately get a good deal of business.

As I write this last sentence there comes to my mind a little Italian fruit-vender that drifted across my domestic horizon a few years ago, who had in some subtle way learned the effectiveness of the courteous note in business relationships.

His real name was Sam, but we named him "Cucus" because when he first arrived from his birthplace in southern Italy and began his daily round with his pushcart delivering fruit and vegetables at our back door, he had his own difficulties with our unmusical language and announced the early green cucumbers as "cucus."

His honesty, his soft, pleasant voice, and his ingratiating manners won trade for him, and it was not long until he was driving a wagon of his own with his name painted in gold along the side. He learned gradually to speak a little better, and at night school he learned to write a very round and very readable hand, though his orthography, his diction, and his punctuation retained some original touches, a condition not in any sense unique.

He had his own troubles, too, as other business men have had, and sometimes he told them confidentially to me. His consignments of fruit were not always good, he could not always dispose of his stock before it became stale, and sometimes landladies did not pay him or unregenerate students imposed upon him and gave him bad checks. It was about such a check that he spoke to me. Cucus was out eight dollars which he could ill afford to lose. He had somehow developed a feeling that I need but say the word and any recreant undergraduate would immediately come to time. When he had told me his story, I found that his was not a difficult matter of adjustment. I agreed to manage it for him, received his gracious thanks and a handful of fresh carrots, attended to the little business the next day, and forgot about it.

A few days later I found a note from him in my morning mail. The spelling is his own; the "Urbanana" probably an echo of his favorite morning announcement at our back door.

I held the letter in my hand a long time, thinking. I do business mostly with cultivated, educated people; I wish they were all as thoughtful and courteous as this Italian fruit-vender. He had already learned something of the personal touch in business through letter-writing.

It is curious how many letters are never acknowledged or answered in any way, and yet every letter, and especially every letter that has in it anything of the personal element, is entitled to a reply of some sort. Every day as part of the routine of my office I am writing to the fathers of various young men who are registered as undergraduates in college. These letters are personal and direct, and they show a knowledge and an interest in the individual with whom they are concerned. But, strangely enough, very few of them are ever acknowledged, or, if they are acknowledged, it is quite often the mother rather than the father who replies.

"Mr. Jones received your letter," she writes, "and being a very busy man he has asked me to reply"—then follow many pages of explanation and appreciation. It has always been a matter of interest and wonderment to me how these busy men with stenographers at their call, usually, find so little time to give to the affairs of their sons, while their wives apparently have nothing else to do but write. I have just been talking over the long distance telephone with a prominent and successful business man to whom, within the last three months, I have written twice about his son. He answered neither of my letters, he explained to me, because he first wanted to see how the boy would respond to the advice he had written him upon the receipt of my first letter. His method, however, did not encourage me very strongly to continue my efforts.

The general tendency is to reply only to letters that are a matter of self-interest or self-advantage. If a reply brings me no profit or pleasure, why make it? If I owe Jones and, for one reason or another, have delayed in meeting my obligation, I hear from him quickly and often; if he owes me and I write him, the mail service is usually pretty slow if it does not cease entirely. It has been my misfortune for a considerable number of years to be indirectly responsible for the collection of va- rious sums of money—subscriptions to certain funds, fraternity and sorority notes, loans due the University from graduates who were given financial help while they were in college. I have written some of these delinquents twice a year for seventeen years without getting a reply. If I happened to meet one of them and the matter of his obligation came up, I asked:

"Why did you not reply to any of the letters I wrote you?"

"Well," he would say, quite without shame, "I didn't have the money; so what was the use of wasting my time and a postage stamp in saying so?"

He seemed never to realize that an explanation of his delay and his delinquency was due me.

It is always a satisfaction to get a gracious reply to a letter. Even when I am convinced that some of the statements contained are exaggerations, and that the promises may never be fulfilled, I am pleased as was a wealthy friend of mine who confessed to me once that he enjoyed flattery, only "it must not be crudely done."

If I write a letter, as I often must, to the father of a former student asking for the present address of the young man, I may wait for weeks before receiving a reply, and quite as often as not I shall never get one. If, however, in writing, I say that I find that he is entitled to a certain rebate, or that it would be to his scholastic advantage if I can hear from him, the reply is sure to come immediately. Self-interest seems to be the strongest motive to induce people to answer letters.

Why do not people answer letters? Often it is carelessness or laziness. They mean to, or at least they say to themselves that they do, but they delay, as sinners delay joining church. Ultimately the letter is lost and they forget all about it. They inveigle themselves into believing that they haven't the time, as a freshman at seven forty-five in the morning persuades himself that he can still snatch ten minutes of sleep and get to an eight o'clock class. They are indifferent or ignorant.

"I have not had a reply from Mr. Rice whom you gave as reference," I say to a junior who has applied for a loan from one of the college loan funds, "do you have any idea why?"

"Well, Mr. Rice is a very busy man," is his explanation, "and I suppose he has not yet got around to it."

But in reality the fact that he is busy is usually the last reason why a man does not reply to a letter. The really busy man must have system or his work piles up. He clears his desk daily knowing that new duties and obligations will be upon him tomorrow. I write to such a man on Monday and by Wednesday morning I have his reply. He has no time to waste in useless temporizing and delay. The busy man decides things at once and gets them done; it is the lazy man and the loafer and the procrastinator whom one never hears from, and the man who has no regular system of doing things.

Not long ago I published a brief article on the subject of acknowledging letters, especially letters of sympathy and congratulation. Any number of people to whom I had at one time or another written such a letter called me up or spoke to me, or wrote me about the matter, and the tenor of their communications was that it had never occurred to them that such a letter required an acknowledgment. One boy wrote, "I was very much ashamed of myself when I read your little essay in Sunday morning's paper and remembered that when you wrote me last summer I made no acknowledgment of your thoughtfulness. Worse than that, I did not realize that I should have done so. It did not occur to me that a reply to your letter which gave to me and to my parents so much pleasure and satisfaction was required, and that it might possibly have made you feel as happy as your letter made me. I think many people are probably as ignorant of this subject as I was, for no one has ever before called my attention to my duty in such a case. I assure you I shall not offend in the future." Very few letters but are entitled to an acknowledgment of some sort. It leaves a good taste in a body's mouth to receive a reply to a letter he has written, no matter how trifling the business is with which it is concerned.

If letters are to be answered at all, they should be answered promptly, excepting perhaps friendly letters, where there is ordinarily a sort of understanding between friends that a reasonable number of days or weeks or months shall intervene between the exchange of communications. One of the dearest friends I have, from whom I am separated by a thousand miles, writes to me and I to him once a year. Neither expects more than this, and each looks forward to the annual letter with interest and pleasure. Ordinarily, however, a letter should be answered at once.

I heard a man say not long ago, a man, too, whose correspondence is large, that he regularly delayed answering letters because if one delayed he would find that many letters really answered themselves and so did not require a written reply. I was interested to note, however, that the top of his desk was always in a litter, that he could never find anything that he wanted, and that his drawers, when he opened them furtively, were crowded with a jumbled mess of papers. People complained often, also, that their communications to him were ignored, that their requests received no attention, and that his official business was in more or less of a tangle. He paid rather dearly, I am convinced, as every man does for delay and neglect in his correspondence.

People sometimes do not reply to letters because they are at a loss to know what to say. This is especially true of letters of congratulation and condolence. Something ought to be said, but what? The situation is similar to speaking to an acquaintance or a friend who has just lost a very near member of his household. We are so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we say nothing. In either case if we would only give expression in as direct and simple a way as possible to what we feel, we should have done a gracious thing and should have brought pleasure or comfort to one of our friends. It does not quite so much matter what we say as that we say something that genuinely expresses our feelings or our obligations.

Most of our reasons for not answering letters are selfish ones. We see no personal profit in it; to do so would take time and thought, and these, we argue, we can not afford, not recognizing the fact that whatever a man really wants to do he will by hook or crook find an opportunity to do.

The writing of letters is very much a matter of temperament. Not every one, because of lack of experience or facility in the use of written language, has learned fully to put his own personality into his letters, but there are very few who do not in some way reveal their personal characteristics through their letters. Men because of their more general training and experience in business are briefer in their letters, more direct, less emotional, more practical. They get to their point more quickly and are often quite barren of details and so lacking in interest. Their communications are like the small boy's diary at sea. "Rained," he says laconically in recounting the events of one day, and the next, "Rained some more," and that for him is the end of the story, being all that happened and all that he has to say.

Women, on the other hand, are not so easily stopped. It is an unusual woman who can get to a simple point in less than four pages; often it requires eight, and then one is sometimes forced to re-read the letter to satisfy one's self as to what the point is. When a father makes inquiry of me as to how his son is getting on in college he usually gets the question out of his system in from four to six lines. When I get such a letter from a mother the communication and the inquiry are generally accompanied with harrowing details of infantile disasters, which had undermined his health and made it difficult or impossible for him to do good work. There are accounts of his difficulties in teething, of the size and influence of his tonsils and adenoids, of the various physical struggles through which he has passed, and which have all but wrecked him. There is the assurance always that if I could only appreciate his many virtues, how hard he has worked, how much he and all his family have worried about his mental progress, I should be more than ordinarily interested in him. And what she really wants to know is what chance he has of continuing in college, but she does not get at that without many and devious preliminary peregrinations.

I have before me now, from a woman, a letter which runs to two thousand words or more. It discusses in much incoherent detail various difficulties which she has had with her tenants, with her neighbors, and with a woman to whom she thought she had rented her house. I have read it over several times, and I have asked a number of my friends to do so, and together we have concluded that what she really wants is to ask me if I should be willing to speak at a parents' association at some not distant date.

Now these women to whom I refer are not illiterate women. Many of them have been to college. Some of them have been teachers, and the one to whom I have last referred is the wife of an educated man, and was herself for several years a teacher. If there is a reason for this curious prolixity in their written speech, it lies, I suppose, in the fact that most women have had little actual contact with business. They are unfamiliar with business methods; they do not approach a subject directly; they are given to complicated explanations.

It is never wise to use sarcasm or to show anger in a letter. The words that are spoken in a passion become blurred and faded with time; their sharpness is dulled as other events intervene, and ultimately we may forget them altogether, but the written word eats into our memory and galls us more and more as time goes on. If we try to forget it, there is still the written page to turn to, and the wound which is caused at first is reopened. Sarcasm always inflames; it is a cruel weapon against which, with many people, there is little or no defense. It sometimes brings the desired result for the moment, but it is likely to cause a permanent feud between the two people concerned in the correspondence. Men are thicker skinned than women and do not take this sort of attack quite so seriously as women do, but even men seldom quite forget the sarcastic slam in a letter. Women never forget it and never quite forgive it. When you have written a woman a sarcastic letter you might as well bring yourself to the conclusion that in the future all diplomatic relations between the two of you will cease. She will never see you without recalling your words; she will have it in for you as long as you live.

It is generally a weak and cowardly thing to write a sarcastic, angry letter. It is seldom if ever justified excepting to stimulate the stolid. It is cowardly because there is often so little "comeback"; it is not a fair open fight. On the surface sarcasm is harmless, without evil intention or guile, but concealed within it is the deadly poison and the sting. It is really meant to hurt. It is weak to show anger because the angry man has for the moment lost control of himself; he admits that he has not the physical strength of self-mastery and such weakness is ordinarily pitiable. The angry man must ultimately apologize for his weakness or leave himself permanently in a bad light, and he is often too weak to apologize.

Not long ago a young sophomore brought me a letter which he had just received from his father. The boy had failed in a part of his college work, and a notice of the fact had gone to the father, who received it, I presume, in his morning mail. The disappointment and the disgrace of it angered him, for he knew that the boy was quite capable of doing his work well, and he yielded weakly to the impulse of the moment and wrote his son and mailed the letter without reading it, perhaps, and certainly without giving any considerate thought to what he had written. It was a cruel, scathing letter that any father should have been ashamed to write, and it cut the boy like a knife. The boy will never quite forget it, especially since the father who no doubt regretted his action as soon as he had had a little while to come to himself, never could quite bring himself in so many words to say so. And the gap gradually widened between the two.

Every one has a tendency to write letters when he is angry; in fact, I am sure I do my cleverest work under such circumstances. Feeling stimulates the imagination, and so for the time being adds force and effectiveness to the style. When I write such a letter, I always read it over with an appreciation of its ironical subtleness, of its careful phrasing, of its stinging effects, and I admit generally that it is a corking good piece of work that will bring the recipient to his senses. And then before signing it I lay it away until the next day. Next morning when I come into my office after a good night's rest I read the letter again and laugh, and admit to myself how well done it is, and then I tear it up and drop it carefully into the wastepaper basket and write another—much less clever, no doubt, not so well phrased, perhaps, but quite logical, quite free from malice and anger. It is a plan which has worked well for me and one that I submit for the sympathetic consideration of others. It gives me all the exhilaration and satisfaction of writing a letter that takes the skin off, and I am never humiliated by having to apologize for having done a thoughtless or ungentlemanly thing.