by Kelly Bischoff

Created on: May 27, 2007   Last Updated: December 02, 2009

In this day and age of electronic mail and instant messages and text messages, I believe that the ordinary letter is no longer ordinary. I think the main difference between the ordinary letter and the email, besides the obvious one of how they are received, is elegance. I believe the ordinary ,or perhaps a better term would be rare, handwritten letter is elegant whereas the email is not.

The handwritten letter has more elegance in the way it is presented. The writer's personality comes out clearly in the gracefully sloping or charmingly childlike letters. I know that there are numerous styles of fonts that a writer can use in writing an email but no one font is as uniquely personal as an individual''s handwriting.

I have just recently started corresponding to my sister again in handwritten letters. Part of the appeal is receiving a piece of mail that is not a bill or credit card offer or one of many pieces of junk mail.

It takes longer to write a handwritten letter than it does to send an email, but this allows the writer to really think about what she wants to say. The writer sits at their desk with the paper before her tapping her pen against her lips while she thinks about what she wants to say. Pictures form in her mind as she remembers recent happenings that she wants to share.

My sister's letters are always fun to read because it is like playing fill in the blanks. Her mind always races much faster than her pen and invariably she skips words here and there. Never to the point of being unable to follow her train of thought, just enough to make it a little more fun to read.

I think that another thing that makes a handwritten letter more elegant than its electronic counterpart is the rarity with which it is received. Years ago ,the only way to correspond was to hand write a letter and I still have letters that I received from friends who were out to sea for months at a time. Old boyfriends and family. People don't usually keep emails in the same way. I have bundles of letters tied together with satin or velvet ribbons and sometimes I like to take them out and read them.

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