When I was in fourth through seventh grades, I went through the compulsory exercise of writing a business letter every school year.
It was just a thing we did once a year, each year. Never mind that as a fourth-grader I had a nonexistent understanding of the exercise in formality. But each year, as part of English and writing, we wrote one formal business letter.
If you add up all the time I spent learning this, cumulatively, I entered the world with the experience of four letters under my pen.
That doesn’t sound like a lot of experience. But the things I learned from those compulsory letters have withstood the test of time and even the onslaught of e-mail.
Never, ever was I instructed to take a letter I received, stuff it in my envelope and pass it along. I could not take the compulsory letter of the student next to me, add my name to her signature, then mail it.
In other words, I could not forward a letter. Letter writing was a personal expression. The same was true for a business letter. It was a formal, personal expression.
Though e-mail is fast and furious, I’m the type of person who prefers to give consent for a letter to be forwarded. When I discover that someone is a promiscuous forwarder, I am very careful about only writing things I do indeed want the whole world to read.
Forwarded mail is like the new Rorschach test. In psychology, we used to show inkblots to people and analyze their personality based on what the person described.
Now, I can look at forwarded e-mail and a plethora of psychology issues are revealed.
The confusion of “to forward” or “not to forward” probably lies in forwarded joke.
Am I a joke teller? Not really. Am I a joke forwarder? Not much.
I’m more of a “did you read this article in the paper?” forwarder. And 99.9 percent of those are forwarded only to my husband. It’s an old habit from growing up in New York. I’m used to reading the morning paper and discussing it.
Every morning, my husband and I have an e-mail conversation about the news in the paper. I drink my coffee, two to three articles, a couple of exclamation points and we’re done.
In my formal business letter training, I never was encouraged to write crude or vulgar statements. How does this stuff find its way to my inbox?
Of course I have a spam catcher, but I see what’s been caught and I’m disgusted. Isn’t this supposed to be written on bathroom walls?
Why would someone sit around and send weird stuff by e-mail to strangers who will never respond? Is spamming the poetic form of flashing?
I’d like to announce to the spammers: You can stop telling me how to make my penis larger. I don’t have a penis.
That’s another subject entirely. Back to the compulsory business letter.
Those letters written in school had to be perfect. No spelling errors, no pronouns mistaken for nouns, no fragmented thoughts.
Honestly, I have sent out e-mails that look like English is my fourth language. I’ve learned to take the time to spell check before hitting send. And I go one step further and actually read it aloud to make corrections before sending.
Remember checking your work by reading aloud? That little trick never wears out its usefulness.
In closing, I’d just like to offer this little SAT pretest: Light is to sound as e-mail is to ________.
Answer: thought
Light travels faster than sound and e-mail travels faster than thought.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com
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