Handwritten letters can still provide the authenticity we all crave | Steve Israel

Holding and reading the handwritten letter I got in the mail the other day felt so strange yet so familiar — like a blast from a not-so-distant, but almost forgotten, past.

That handwritten personal letter from an Orange County reader was the first I’d received in what seems like years.

Oh, I get plenty of actual mail — bills, requests for donations and too many too-good-to-be-true offers for health, life or car insurance. Apart from the bills, just about all of that mail goes in the circular file beneath my desk — the garbage.

But this letter, written with black ink in clear writing and covering two pages of a notecard, felt so special I actually read it a couple of times.

No wonder.

In these days of instant email and texts, handwritten letters are going the way of so many relics of the past — like pay phones.

Almost two thirds of Americans haven’t hand-written a personal letter in at least the past five years, according to a 2021 CBS News poll. And here’s something that should make our former English teachers shudder or, in the case of some of them, turn over in their graves: about 15% of us have never — that’s never — written a handwritten letter.

This isn’t just a generational divide. Even those of us who grew up without computers and cell phones haven’t exactly been flooding mailboxes with handwritten letters.

Only about half of Americans 65 or older have handwritten a letter in the past five years, according to that poll.

So why did Barbara Doty, 76, of Thompson Ridge near Pine Bush write me that chatty note requesting information about an article I’d written, and offer some nice words about my writing?

“I just prefer to do that,” says Doty, a former school teacher, administrator and college professor who does say she’s a bit “technologically challenged” (although she was able to look online for the information she wanted). Doty also says that as a former educator, she knows how important it is to praise someone because saying something positive “makes the greatest lasting impact.”

Then there’s this bit of wisdom:

“I think I read somewhere that if you want to get someone’s attention today, write a handwritten letter,” says the woman who certainly got my attention.

Not only did I read her letter a couple of times, I began to think about why, in this age of instant electronic communication, handwritten letters still matter – maybe more than ever.

Perhaps it’s because when you sit down, pick up a pen and find a piece of paper or note card, you have to think about what you’re going to say before you write — so you won’t have to muck up the paper with inky cross outs, as opposed to simply deleting emails with the touch of a key. In this era when name-calling has replaced reason, when you can scream electronically by using all capital letters or try to express complex emotions with an emoji, writing by hand makes you at least try to be more expressive, more nuanced. After all, everything in the world — from politics to relationships — isn’t black and white, like quick hit texts and emails often make it seem. And don’t get me started on that annoying and lazy email shorthand like “u” instead of “you.”

There’s also something more personal about holding a handwritten letter rather than reading a computer screen – just like holding an old photo is more personal than seeing a digital one.

In a world that often seems so fleeting, when yesterday’s news often seems like ancient history, a letter written by hand, in ink and on paper, represents one thing we all seem to crave: something real, something tangible, something we can actually hold onto.

Steve Israel, a longtime Times Herald-Record editor and columnist, can be reached at steveisrael53@outlook.com.

This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Handwritten letters can still provide the authenticity we all crave