How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) / A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence

A STAR BOOK
(Formerly the book of letters) A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence BY Mary Owens Crowther
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK
CL COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
The forms for engraved invitations, announcements, and the like, and the styles of notepapers, addresses, monograms, and crests are by courtesy of the Bailey, Banks and Biddle Company, Brentano's, and The Gorham Company. The Western Union Telegraph Company has been very helpful in the chapter on telegrams.
THE PARTS OF A LETTER
BEING APPROPRIATE—WHAT TO AVOID
PERSONAL LETTERS—SOCIAL AND FRIENDLY
It is not so long since most personal letters, after an extremely formal salutation, began I take my pen in hand. We do not see that so much nowadays, but the spirit lingers. Pick up the average letter and you cannot fail to discover that the writer has grimly taken his pen in hand and, filled with one thought, has attacked the paper. That one thought is to get the thing over with.

And perhaps this attitude of getting the thing over with at all costs is not so bad after all. There are those who lament the passing of the ceremonious letter and others who regret that the literary letter—the kind of letter that can be published—is no longer with us. But the old letter of ceremony was not really more useful than a powdered wig, and as for the sort of letter that delights the heart and lightens the labor of the biographer—well, that is still being written by the kind of person who can write it. It is better that a letter should be written because the writer has something to say than as a token of culture. Some of the letters of our dead great do too often remind us that they were not forgetful of posterity.
The average writer of a letter might well forget culture and posterity and address himself to the task in hand, which, in other than the most exceptional sort of letter, is to say what he has to say in the shortest possible compass that will serve to convey the thought or the information that he wants to hand on. For a letter is a conveyance of thought; if it becomes a medium of expression it is less a letter than a diary fragment.