An Observation

I've been doing a little thinking about the many forms that modern letters come in. Traditional letters have sort of transformed into emails, and old school notes have turned into text messages. But what gets lost electronically? Yes, emails can have fancy "stationary" that creates a background for the content, and you can pick the font that you type it up in, but you can't really put your signature on it (unless you create a jpeg of your signature and paste it into the bottom of every email). The handwritten quality gets lost. Notes, simple notes that you pass to each other in class lose the fun of folding it up into a paper football or a paper samurai hat. You can't fold a text message into a samurai hat. Chatspeak, or txtsk, is a whole other element to texting. It's not even like its consistent either.

Two different translations of the same sentence are seen here: The first translation- n my opiniN, txt spk cn gt vry confusn, seriSly. I mean hu cn undRst& ll dis? dats w@ QWERTY keyboards wr inventd 4!

And the Second- n my opinion, txt spk cn git v confusing, CreslE. I mean hu cn undRstNd aL this? datz wot QWERTY keyboards wer invented for!

And that's not even how I would text it- IMO, txt spk can get vry confusing, srsly. I mean, who can understand all this? Thats what QWERTY keybrds were invented 4!

Not to mention whole lists of acronyms and short hands! This is just one of many.
Oh, modern technology...

Some Formal Requirements

After a little bit of poking around in the giant vat of the internet, I found a few pages on the formal layout of a letter. This guide shows you everything from business letters to love letters, and every thing in between. I'm a little concerned if you need help writing a love letter, but hey, what do I know? I think for my own personal use, I'll be using a friendly letter format. Friendly letters do have a specified format. There will be further research on this. Must. Read. More. Letters.

Ooh! Look! A Book!

In my attempts to find proper letter formats, I came across a book of letters. In this book, entitled "More Letters to Rollins", is an entire collection of fan mail. Yes, this is a sequel. But before we get too wrapped up in that fact, lets quickly move on to the form.

Each letter in the book is typed in a font that best represents its original form. From some of the research I've done it's hard to discern whether or not these letters are really real, but for sake of this explanation, let's say they are. Some fonts are repeated, others are not. There are also pictures included with some of the letters and one particularly adorable hand written letter by a young girl named Ashley. Some of them are formal, with headers and addresses, others appear to be emails. Others still seem like notes, scrawled on paper, typed up before printing. Some of the letters have actual signatures, others just typed names. Now, onto the content.

Each of these letters reflects a new side to the multi-faceted Henry Rollins. Some are continued conversations, in which we the readers only see their half of the conversation. None of the letters have a response from Henry. Some of the letters to correlate to other letters within the book. In this way, through connected letters and multiple correspondences, characters are created. None of them are very deeply developed, but you do know quite a bit about them through the way they write and what they say.

In general it's a very interesting perspective. This book is a great example of what is acceptable for modern letters.

Letters: a Correspondence

Letters, as in the alphabet, are the basis for which writing is based in most languages. But letters are also pieces of paper passed back and forth from people to people to transfer information. These letters were, and still are, the predecessors of email. This system was also known as correspondence. Dictionary.com has aided me by giving me the definition for letters as well as the definition for correspondence.

I have a very distinct memory of learning how to properly write a letter in first grade. I'm sure that this has changed over the years, and perhaps my research shall lead me to discover its many forms.