As I reached into the cabinet to extract a new notebook, I noticed a stack of looseleaf paper, white sheets with three holes down the left-hand side and blue horizontal lines linked together by a red vertical line about an inch and one-half from the left side. I share that description for young readers whose schoolwork has always been via keyboard instead of pen to paper.

I smiled to myself because I remember calling such paper the “letterhead of friendship” because of so many handwritten letters being created on looseleaf paper. Of course, that got me to thinking about letters and that got me to…well, this week’s column.

We have lost so much by having lost the art and practice of letter writing. Will emails appear in biographies and other works about people of our era, like letters do in books about artists, writers, leaders and philosophers of yore? How would we know that Churchill was such a romantic if it weren’t for his letters?  Or insights into the hearts and minds of Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman, Ben Franklin, Edward Weston… or the teachings of Alphonsus de Liguori, St. Paul…the list is endless because there was a time when correspondence was the method of sharing between two people in ways that could be re-visited over time. Many of us oldsters remember letters that were read so many times that the creases had to be taped to hold the paper together.

In 1994, I wrote a piece about correspondence for the newsletter of an Across the University Writing Program. The opening paragraphs read,

Recognize this?  It’s a letter.  Correspondence.  One half of the two-way communication that involves putting words into a readable format to convey information, feelings, glimpses into the heart, congratulations on winning a magazine sweepstakes, or notification that your bill is overdue.  Good news, bad news, mindless trivia and the innermost expressions of the soul have been found in this endangered species of communications, the letter.

The rules of correspondence were once defined by the audience.  Whether between friends, general personal letters, or for business communications, these three categories pretty much covered the options for writing styles.  But today’s world of the extinction of etiquette, and the existence of e-mail challenges the rules of writing. Communication today is no less important, just less recognized. 

I read those words and consider how much further we have drifted from the practice of correspondence.

Many years ago, I created a Memories to Memoirs workshop that included learning four different types of writing, one of which was correspondence that I described as the most intimate form of writing because it is intended for an audience of one. Nowadays people write personal messages in social media hoping to track thousands or millions of “friends.”

We need to get back to letter writing, though it is easier said than done. Chances are that we can cite email addresses of some of our friends, but not their mailing address. Send someone an email today to ask them for their mailing address. Get some looseleaf paper. Let the fun begin and the connections renew.