Letters versus email

Which is better? Yes.

“Style has to have substance.
It has to have fire.
It’s about being yourself on purpose.”
—Raquel Welch

If you doubt that Wichita is a small town, here’s a story. There’s a guy here, his sister works at the Ulrich Art Museum on campus. This guy’s job takes him into homes for sale to root around and find things. I don’t remember the particulars of his employ – with auction houses? Real estate? A cleaning service? It doesn’t matter.

He was in a small attic partition and stumbled on a bundle of letters addressed to Ens. R.C. Welsbacher in the Washington, DC, Navy Yard. He didn’t know who that was, but he recalled that on the campus where Sis works, there’s a chunk of a building named The Welsbacher Theatre. So he asked her about it. She didn’t know Ens. R.C. or me personally but, unlike her brother, she knew of us. She knew that building was named after my father, who had taught at WSU for 30 years, and that he had a daughter, to wit: me.

She rooted around in Google and found me and called, and I trotted up the street and we had quite the chat. (I chatted with her colleague, too, who had just hired a curator she was excited about, who I would later see in our church one Sunday, having just moved to town to start work at the Ulrich where she’d just been…but that’s another story.)

My mother’s love letters to her fiancee were written in 1945 during a brief period prior to and after the War. They touch not only on personal events and feelings but also on experiencing war’s end, something I can barely fathom in this era when we seem to live through undefined battles that neither begin nor end and have no stated goals. I have read most of those letters, but at some point it became too difficult. Eventually I’ll get through them, arrive to a place where I can set them aside.

I have letters from my father to me, and they are around somewhere, but I am ashamed to admit that they are sloppily preserved, scattered here and there, stuffed into old diaries, folded in with Christmas cards from others.

Luckily, I also have a folder on my computer with a handful of emails my father wrote in the final years of his life. Most are very short, often noting lunch we’d had that day or plans for the next, although, my father being the writer he was, even these perfuctory notes are entertaining. I read a few in preparing for this issue of Well Worded. It’s the first time I’ve looked at them since he died almost eight years ago, and what lovely truffles of pleasure they offered, frosted with time.

The value of the letters from my mother to her sweetheart is, objectively, vast—for anybody (or at least any historian) doing the measuring. I mean, my God, a witness to The Great War! References to the fashions and activities of an era we can only otherwise see in movies. Their value to me personally is beyond vast: they offer a real-time window into the complicated family and mind of the woman who gave birth to me when she herself was a decade away from Momhood, fresh out of school, still sorting out romantic dalliances, still too young even to vote. A woman I never knew. The letters are rare and precious.

But those emails from my father, while perhaps insubstantial as archival ephemera, are equally dear to me. They speak of small things, hours and minutes with the man I did know. Strung together, those units of time create a life of shared personal history.

How we communicate has evolved for as long as we have. When email was new, a stubborn subset of people disparaged of it, insisting that letters were superior. Rather quickly (compared with, say, the time that passed between the invention of the Gutenberg press and the days of wandering troubadors), email became yesterday’s tired trope, bending to the will of social (which apparently is now a noun).

But neither letters nor email are going anywhere. They’ve just scooted onto the bench next to the social that allegedly threatens them, near the printed words that were going to destroy the art of storytelling, alongside the actors who, I dunno, pissed off the cave artists. They’ve just evolved to fill whatever holes need filling at any given time.

Fun fact: older folks often prefer email, at least in some circumstances, according to one December 2022 study in the U.K.

“Businesses serving an older customer base may assume they won’t respond well to email—but this is not the case,” says Anthony Coo, product head at Quadient, which conducted the study. “People aged 55 and over are more appreciative of the instant, always-available nature of email.” They also like the ability to access them from anywhere at any time, including holidays.

Overwhelmingly, folks of any age want important legal or medical stuff to come via post—mail can’t be hacked, it’s private, and it can be sent with guaranteed delivery—but getting junk mail pretending to be important mail irritates a lot of us. (Did we really need a study to tell us that last bit?)

If you’re trying to raise funds, one outfit aligned with Australia’s Monash University that researches behavior change suggests you look at what each can do, how we engage with each, and what each achieves.

Letters, for example, can reach folks who don’t have email. They stick around physically, constantly reminding the recipient they’re there. Their envelopes can include Free Stuff—like the notecards and return-address stickers I mentioned in another issue of this newsletter. When a person opens a letter, that’s all she’s doing. She isn’t batting away popup ads or peripherally viewing headers of other emails in her inbox. Presuming that her cat isn’t sitting on it, she’s looking only at that letter.

On the other hand, sending letters is expensive and involves more time and labor, and once they’re sent, you have fewer means of measuring their effectiveness. Best is a sensible combination of both: Send emails first (which is cheap), and then follow up with letters to those who didn’t respond to the email.

If you want to run an effective business and/or be a good boss, Petra coach advocates the personal touch—a handwritten note or letter. In addition to its advantages for job-hunters, writing a letter by hand offers benefits both professional and emotional for you, the writer.

Since you can’t hit the delete button or use a digital spell-checker, you’re forced to think about what you want to say and how you’re going to fit it into the limited space you’ve got available. What verbs can replace five adjectives? What introductory phrases—“I wanted to let you know”; “It goes without saying”; “In order to”—can you eject? (I recall here that short story by Ernest Hemingway consisting of six words: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.) The time needed to write the letter also forces you to sit and think quietly for a few minutes.

You can reflect, perhaps, on the vagaries of time, how it stretches and bends, from the minutes it took to thank your daughter for lunch one Tuesday afternoon to the generations of your family celebrating occasions you never knew existed until you held them in your hand, on paper with ink testifying to the lives and loves that came before you.

Both are precious.

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Lagniappe: A friend commented earlier that if she knew my address, she’d send me a thank-you note for my column about writing thank-you notes. With that comment, she gave me two gifts: a good giggle and a reminder of how good her poetry is. Here is one for you, linked here with permission from the poet: “My Father Before He Was My Father” by Anita Skeen.