The Romance of a Handwritten Letter

Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.

What is your experience of receiving or sending a hand written letter?

How do you think receiving a hand written letter is different from an email letter?

In this information age we can talk to others in real time. We can send a text, tweet, send an email while we are on the subway or from a cafe. It’s very nice that we can at the same moment touch base with those we love at anytime. We can keep our relationships alive so much more from anywhere in the world. So does this spell the end for the post office and handwritten letters?

In the late 1990s when the Internet was really beginning to become popular we had a professor at university talk about how Internet shopping could spell the end for shopping malls. The conclusion of his speech was that people are social and not everyone wants to sit at a computer and shop online for everything. We want to experience things. There is something personal, something exciting about going to a shopping center or market and experiencing the food smells, the chatter and noise from cafes, the touch of clothing, the interesting people we can see walking around. Basically, the ambience of a market or shopping center is different from sitting at a computer which has no personality.

And I’m like many other people; I embraced technology and loved being able to be and have easy connection with my friends and the world.  But more recently I’ve discovered the simplicity of things like a handwritten letter. There is something special about receiving a handwritten letter. You can see the emotion in the hand writing, you can know that the writer had to think about what they said. Sometimes we write an email and it’s instant, but it doesn’t have the same amount of your personality and feeling in it as you can experience by seeing someone’s handwriting - handwriting style that is special to only one person in the whole world. I remember seeing my great grandfather’s handwritten letter once. He had been in a war and he had written about his experience. It was like looking at a photograph. It was like the letter was alive and I could imagine him. I think if he had written an email, it would never have had that same feeling.

So next time you want to surprise your significant other, then you might think about sending a handwritten letter, or at least a postcard. A text or an email when we are on vacation shows that we care and are thinking about that other person, but the amount of time and hard work in writing and going to the post office will show that other person that they are top of the mind for you.

Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning. The meaning of these words is how they are used in the reading.

 The answers are below the table.