Letter Writing - A Lost Art or Dead Language?

I know, that title sounded like the cover page of a high school research paper, but when you think about it, letter writing has definitely lost it's place in this country as a viable form of communication.

In a world dominated with texting, e-mail, cell phone calls, Google/Facebook chatting, we have lost something that was a central part of our culture, and that, my friends, would be the art of the handwritten letter. It's positively disgraceful that people have stopped communicating in this form - it lends itself to such an aire of personalization and intimacy. I feel like it is because of this that people's handwriting has become more and more illegible over time, and our children are incapable of writing in script.

Now personally, I handwrite all sympathy and thank you notes, which results in me burning through a pack of stationary about once a year. I don't write in script all that often because mine is sub-par (from years of neglect) but I'm working to improve it, and not to sound like John Hancock, but my signature dominates (A friend of mine referred to it as "epic" one time, which I took as a total compliment, but in retrospect I think the comment may have been in sarcasm).

I remember in elementary school my teachers always saying, "You better learn how to write well in cursive, because once you get to high school you'll have to write everything like that!" That was a total falsehood and I'm still a little bitter about it (... bitches...).

Now don't get me wrong, I text constantly, e-mail from my iPhone like it's my job (... Oh wait...) and make 17 second phone calls on a regular basis. But I feel like you need to have the handwritten letter thrown in there every once in a while to keep some sort of decorum in the maelstrom of new-age communication.

In summary, handwritting letters is not only Gentlemanly, but also classic. I promise that any person who receives a handwritten letter these days will be impressed.

This rant spurred on by the momentum of failure.

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