THE ART OF LETTER WRITING

Shannon News, 22 August 1924, Page 4

THE ART OF LETTER WRITING

Correspondence takes up -much time and is rather expensive, and therefore I think that letters —riot only business letters, but letters between friends — should never be slipshod in their arrangement or obscure in their matter (writes John Blunt in the London Daily Mail). Mr. Justice Horridge expressed the wish that % "in the places where women are educated t*hey*would learn to date their letters and write on consecutive pages." But I go further still, and heartily wish that where both men and women are educated they would be taught to write clear, logical letters, and taught the importance of attending promptly and carefully to the letters of their friends and relatives. I find that! numbers of people have an incapacity amounting almost to an inhibition to answer the questions one asks them in a letter, or even, in some cases, to answer at all. How many of us know how to write really good leltters, and how many of us take the trouble of answering minutely the letters we receive? There are often questions we do not want to answer and things we do not want to go into, bul there is often real lack of care as well as feigned. One often finds it difficult to get people to answer a string of the most harmless questions. Presumably they would not be asked unless an answer was wanted. Some people never atfcend adequate-

ly to their correspondence. They go on the principle that if the letter is unimportant it will answer itself, and that if it is important it will be repeated. This is maddening do their correspondent. Yet some of ' these same , people* would take endless trouble for one an other directions. It is very odd, and only shows, I think, that our education does not lay sufficient stress on the importance of letter writing in .#ll its phases.