The Handwritten Letter: 4 Reasons We Need to Bring it Back

A Farmish Kind of Life

Someone give me a pen and a paper. I'm gonna sit down and write a handwritten letter. (Well, I mean, after I finish this blog post.) (Don't want to read all the words? This blog post is also a podcast—just press the triangle play button on the little black bar at the top of this post!) When I was younger, I had many pen pals. Even as an adult—before Facebook’s popularity—I found a pen pal through an old fashioned living/homesteader forum. And though she and I are now friends on Facebook, we do the vast majority of our communication by way of a handwritten note, letter, or card. The majority of people I’ve asked say they love to receive handwritten letters or cards in the mail. It lets them know someone is thinking about them because they put the effort in to sending them something special. However, most of those people I asked admitted they don’t send handwritten mail. While a few people said they don’t send cards or letters anymore because the cost is prohibitive, the majority of people I asked said they don’t send handwritten mail because it simply takes too much time. Time. You know, that thing we were supposed to be saving with all the technology and advancements we add to our lives? (That’s a whole different blog post, though, so…) Our communication now may be faster and more efficient, but is it actually better? Is it to be considered an improvement that we can blast off a paragraph's worth of response in less than 15 seconds? In some ways, maybe. But I’d argue that it’s not better in all ways or every situation. See, the thing I’ve realized is this: regardless of the reason for the death of the handwritten letter, the quality of our communication has changed because of it. And this is much deeper than what it first seems at face value. A handwritten letter requires time to write each word. I sat down to write a letter to a friend last week and was amazed at how much longer it takes to w-r-i-t-e out the very same words than if I were to type them out on Facebook. Do I want to write that paragraph about what the chickens/my kids/the neighbor did yesterday? Do I want to write out what I think of my friend’s sister’s boyfriend? Or should I leave it out? What’s really important or pertinent to this note? And how long will my 40-year-old hands and fingers hold out to continue this pen-and-paper letter? Which got me to thinking—if people had to hand write all their emotional, dramatic, political explosions, would there be as many of them? Or would we get better at sighing and scrolling past because it wouldn’t be worth our effort to drag out a pen and paper? Communication happens much faster now—and it's changed what we allow to be said. A handwritten letter devotes complete attention to the person you’re writing to. On social media, it is not uncommon for me to have several chats open at once. And while I can get a lot done in a short amount of time, I also haven’t fully given myself to any of the conversations I’m having. You can’t be scatterbrained about who you’re writing to when you’re using a pen and paper. There’s not enough room on the kitchen table to be working on 12 letters at once. You have to focus on one person at a time—which brings with it a sort of importance and reverence for the individual that’s being written to. A handwritten letter means a break in the day. It might have something to do with the fact that to write a letter, it requires that you take a break from what you were doing, but I tend to think that sitting down to work on a handwritten letter is just as enjoyable for the writer as it is for the receiver. I would argue that in the days when the handwritten letter was more common, people knew how to take a break every once in awhile. We could learn a lot from taking time for the handwritten letter. It’s more than just words on paper. It’s a break within a way to connect. But one of the biggest changes I see that’s come along with the ...