How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) | Page 3

to which these epistles,
genuine and pseudonymous, are attached.
Some of the letters of Cicero are rather epistles, as they were intended
for the general reader.
The ancient world--Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Rome, and
Greece--figures in our inheritance of letters. In Egypt have been
discovered genuine letters. The papyrus discoveries contain letters of
unknowns who had no thought of being read by the general public.
During the Renaissance, Cicero's letters were used as models for one of
the most common forms of literary effort. There is a whole literature of
epistles from Petrarch to the Epistolæ obscurorum virorum. These are,
to some degree, similar to the Epistles of Martin Marprelate.

Later epistolary satires are Pascal's "Provincial Letters," Swift's
"Drapier Letters," and the "Letters of Junius."
Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Montagu, was the first
Englishman who treated letter writing as an art upon a considerable
scale.
Modern journalism uses a form known as the "open letter" which is
really an epistle.
But we are not here concerned with the letter as literature.
CHAPTER II
THE PURPOSE OF THE LETTER
No one can go far wrong in writing any sort of letter if first the trouble
be taken to set out the exact object of the letter. A letter always has an
object--otherwise why write it? But somehow, and particularly in the
dictated letter, the object frequently gets lost in the words. A
handwritten letter is not so apt to be wordy--it is too much trouble to
write. But a man dictating may, especially if he be interrupted by
telephone calls, ramble all around what he wants to say and in the end
have used two pages for what ought to have been said in three lines. On
the other hand, letters may be so brief as to produce an impression of
abrupt discourtesy. It is a rare writer who can say all that need be said
in one line and not seem rude. But it can be done.
The single purpose of a letter is to convey thought. That thought may
have to do with facts, and the further purpose may be to have the
thought produce action. But plainly the action depends solely upon how
well the thought is transferred. Words as used in a letter are vehicles for
thought, but every word is not a vehicle for thought, because it may not
be the kind of word that goes to the place where you want your thought
to go; or, to put it another way, there is a wide variation in the
understanding of words. The average American vocabulary is quite
limited, and where an exactly phrased letter might completely convey
an exact thought to a person of education, that same letter might be

meaningless to a person who understands but few words. Therefore, it
is fatal in general letter writing to venture into unusual words or to go
much beyond the vocabulary of, say, a grammar school graduate.
Statistics show that the ordinary adult in the United States--that is, the
great American public--has either no high school education or less than
a year of it. You can assume in writing to a man whom you do not
know and about whom you have no information that he has only a
grammar school education and that in using other than commonplace
words you run a double danger--first, that he will not know what you
are talking about or will misinterpret it; and second, that he will think
you are trying to be highfalutin and will resent your possibly quite
innocent parade of language.
In a few very effective sales letters the writers have taken exactly the
opposite tack. They have slung language in the fashion of a circus
publicity agent, and by their verbal gymnastics have attracted attention.
This sort of thing may do very well in some kinds of circular letters,
but it is quite out of place in the common run of business
correspondence, and a comparison of the sales letters of many
companies with their day-to-day correspondence shows clearly the
need for more attention to the day-to-day letter. A sales letter may be
bought. A number of very competent men make a business of writing
letters for special purposes. But a higher tone in general
correspondence cannot be bought and paid for. It has to be developed.
A good letter writer will neither insult the intelligence of his
correspondent by making the letter too childish, nor will he make the
mistake of going over his head. He will visualize who is going to
receive his letter and use the kind of language that seems best to fit
both the subject matter and the reader, and he will give the fitting of the
words to the reader the first choice.
There is something of a feeling