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Love Letters?Anne Applebaum takes readers' questions about written correspondence in the digital age.

Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2007, at 1:16 PM ET

Slate columnist Anne Applebuam was online at Washingtonpost.com on Friday, Aug. 3, to discuss Hillary Clinton's college correspondence and the lost art of letter writing. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

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Anonymous: How embarrassing to have what is essentially your personal diary (meant for one other person's eyes alone) sold to the highest bidder for all to see. What a violation of a friendship and lack of respect for privacy.

Anne Applebaum: Indeed—although I think there are many worse possible violations of privacy than having your college letters discovered, particularly if you are married to Bill Clinton.

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Charlottesville, Va.: How has the advent of e-mail and texting affected the traditional letter?

Anne Applebaum: I think the affect has been profound, not just on letter-writing but on writing in general. I know myself that when I write emails I drop puncutation and capitalization, don't bother with full sentences, use lots of ellipses....and it infects my real writing too. But the worst isn't the grammar, it's the fact that whole writing styles become impossible online: the paragraph-length joke, the meandering description, the tongue-in-cheek sentence, these somehow don't make sense in online communication, where the point is to answer quickly. If you tell a joke, it has to be a one-liner.

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Fairfax County, Va.: The reason why e-mail doesn't constitute a "real" letter is that there's no tangible, physical presence of the other person that having a real paper letter with your friend's or loved one's handwriting on it conveys. You can't glean non-literal cues from their handwriting, the pressure they put on the stationery, or other sensual aspects (to include the perfume they might have been using at the time!) that are in the real letter. It's otherwise all electrons, ready to be discarded at the next computer or operating system upgrade, or lost when the next virus attacks.

Plus, there really is a community of folks who love to use a good fountain pen, some silky stationery and some distinctive colors of inks to add real flair to our letters. For those of us, it's as much of a sensual thing in the process of writing, much more than the scribbles from a disposable ballpoint (stolen from a hotel room) on a legal pad—though even that would be preferable to an e-mail.

Anne Applebaum: Yes, and no way to stain the ink with teardrops either, a gesture which features in many epistolary novels.

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The 'Net: OMG, ltr-writing is dying? LOL. Y U think that is?

Anne Applebaum: I've never learned to be eloquent in IM-speak. But I gather it is now reaching new levels of sophistication. Danielle Crittenden has just written an entire book in IM-speak—"The President's IMs" imagining how Bush/Condi/Dick etc would communicate with one another if they used it.

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Washington: In addition to corporate restaurants and shopping areas overtaking and transforming the atmosphere of unique American towns and cities, is this lack of letter-writing yet another indication of our disappearing culture? Or was there ever an "American culture" in the traditional sense of the word?

Anne Applebaum: Of course there's an American culture, it just changes with amazing speed—that's part of its nature. And a few years later, the changes are adopted everywhere else. That's what makes American culture so uncomfortable and unsettling for much of the rest of the world.

As I said in the original column, I don't think there's much point in mourning the passing of letter-writing, it's an inevitability. I just wanted to express the sudden wave of nostalgia I felt when I thought about it.

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Applebaum is a weekly foreign affairs columnist for Slate and Washington Post. She was previously political editor for the Evening Standard and deputy editor for the Spectator magazine, both in London and was Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Gulag: A History.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

I agreed with these folks regarding the NOTION of letter-writing...the good old days, as we'd say: trying out a new fancy pen, the pretty stationary, the long pauses over how to word something just right....

But if you offered me email or letter-writing today, it'd be a slam-dunk choice. Emailing is all about touching base immediately - no fussing over stamps and mailing and trying to summarize a month's activity in one page! - and that's time and time is worth a thousand carefully-placed words on paper. My mother and I "converse" in brief but fun or sad or glad or mad email almost every single day now, and when letter-writing was all we had she was lucky to get a weekly phone call from me and vice versa. And there are off-the-cuff things you'd tell someone in an email that you wouldn't have shared in a letter. Spontaneity is so sweet!

The good old days of trying to figure out what to write in a letter are gone, and I say to all that: Fare Thee Well!!

--Dana

(To reply, click here.)

Speaking as a mother of teenagers, I can absolutely tell you that letter writing is becoming obsolete. Take my oldest who was at Basic Training in Ft Jackson, SC. The only communication they were allowed for 11 weeks was a telephone call MAYBE once a week (for all of 1 minute) and letters. Being one of those crazy mothers that insist on hand written thank-you notes, he was already primed for this....I even got a "thanks, mom, for making me do that when I was a kid" from him. Ha!

He could not beleive the number of guys who came to him who had no idea how to address an envelope. The same thing happened when he went to college. As a plebe, cell phones were confiscated and the only communication was letters for the first 9 weeks. Guys went to his room to ask him how to address envelopes or to make sure they did it right. He even described some of the "fomats" these guys used....incredible.

I remember learning how to write letters, personal and business, in grade school. I find it sad that the personal touch has, or is becoming eliminated. Are we really in that much of a hurry?

--acesm

(To reply, click here.)

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