Less is more in letter writing … or is it?

“The modern style of letter-writing gains in force what it loses in circumlocution and ceremony. It is characterized by directness and brevity.”

Those words were written in 1891 by Daphne Dale, who comprosed what she called a “practical guide to deportment, easy manners and social etiquette.” In one chapter the author addressed written correspondence, which in those days strictly meant penned letters – in black ink – on quality stationery, folded, sealed and stamped appropriately. After all, as she said, a “slovenly seal is intolerable.”

So, too, was bad penmanship because such illegible handwriting (permitted only by lawyers), she wrote, “often obscures other grievous faults; and it may sometimes be suspected that one who affects a wretched hand does so the better to conceal his ignorance of the Queen’s English.”

This week as I began the task of writing thank-you notes – a mandate from my mother and from her mother before that – I couldn’t help but wonder if the tradition was not archaic. Would not an e-mail message suffice? “Thanx; lg tee fitz. Hope same w/yu.”

That certainly would reduce the risk of sloppy chirography and, heaven forbid, any “flourishes, heavy shadings, back slopings, and all that sort of thing.” Too, it would alleviate my concerns about slovenly seals: also known as putting stamp upside down and somewhat tilted on almost-top-right of envelope.

Daphne Dale did call for brevity, warning us letter writers against piling phrase on phrase. “Words of learned length and thundering sound, so dear to the epistolary writer of the last century, are no longer in favor, plain, vigorous, Anglo-Saxon, free from affectation and absurdity, making a happy contrast between the new and the old.” She dismissed as “high-flown epistles” the writing that served as models for “young men and maidens since Lord Chesterfield’s day, their fine words, rounded sentences and ponderous sentiment striking the modern ear with a delicious sense of the ridiculous and an equally delicious sense of the far-fetched and the archaic.”

Besides that, those ceremonious ancestors, as she called them, were by no means “over-nice” in the particulars of spelling, punctuation and grammar. “They abbreviated shockingly; they spelled with the greatest freedom; their punctuation was indifferent; in grammar they were rather weak, to say the least, and some of them scrawled worse than a modern school-boy.”

There’s no doubt what Daphne Dale would say about contemporary letter writing, or any about what Mama would say about prompt and proper thank-you notes. For the record, I’m taking pen in hand to do right by both these ladies.

But there’s no doubt I’d rather e-mail.