Email vs. Letters

We now live in a world in which communication is fast-paced and it is expected to have quick responses. This is made easier with emails, which have seem to have taken over our lives. I know that this is the case of many people, myself included. If I am not in class, I will check my email at least every hour. When I am waiting for a quick response from another individual, I will continue to check it a couple of times an hour until I receive the responding email. It is definitely less common today to send and receive letters, since they require more time to write and actually mail to the individual. I very rarely hear of people sending letters to others. Anne Applebaum from the Washington Post supports the change to a fast-pace environment that we see in today’s world: “One of the people who wrote letters to me 20 years ago is now so busy that he can't be expected to take a phone call, let alone write a letter. When I communicate with the rest of my old pen pals, I do so by e-mail, usually a few sentences at a time.” But there is definitely a difference between writing an email and writing a letter that relates to etiquette. Etiquette should be expected in everyday interactions, and sometimes this is not the case with the quick-pace world that we live in today.

E-mail is intended to convey instant thought and to evoke fast responses—they lack emotional depth. There are times when people will respond to an email quickly without reflecting on their tone. I am sometimes guilty of this; there have been times when I am in such a rush that my main goal is to quickly respond to an email and I forget to check how the email will come across to the other person.  There are times when the email came off negatively to the reader when I had no intention of being negative or rude. I like the advice given in the podcast, to make sure you wait at least 10 seconds before you “send” an email. I think it is important to read over your emails so that they are not misunderstood by the reader. Applebaum says ““Letters have gone the way of the gentle anecdote, the meandering sentence and the ironic paragraph. Try lengthy irony in an e-mail, and you'll be misunderstood. Try it even in a newspaper column, and you risk furious attack.”

When writing letters, we have more time to think about etiquette. Letters are lengthier than emails and this gives us more time to process what we are writing. Therefore, we can go back and change a sentence that we wrote previously if we incorrectly stated it. Also, after writing a letter, we have a much longer time before we “send” or mail the letter, when compared to an email. This is enough time to think about the letter and change the content if need be.

Overall, I would take the advice given in the podcast, to count to 10 before sending an email. Even though this is a very short period of time, it could be enough time to evaluate when you wrote in the email and change any wording that may lead the reader to any misconceptions.

Applebaum, Anne. "When We Wrote Letters." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 31 July 2007. Web. 21 Mar. 2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/30/AR2007073001272.html>.