Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/151

 correct relationships, and his verbs were tortured into the weirdest forms.

"Why do you speak so murderously bad?" I asked him when he gave me a chance to say something.

"The ordinary vernacular always makes a hit with the 'hicks, he replied, "and it takes me a while to readjust myself when I return to civilization."

I am sure his psychology is wrong, and that care and correctness in speech and in writing is more effective with even the untrained and illiterate than is slovenly, careless, ungrammatical English. The neatest, tidiest letter is always the best one, no matter who receives it.

In general all business letters are alike. They follow the same courteous dignified and impersonal tone. They are cast in the same mechanical form, they employ the same sort of stationery. As to the last, the better the quality and the more conservative the appearance the more effective it is. Cheap, flashy stationery advertises the writer himself as cheap and second-class. There are, however, certain types of business letters which are entitled to a separate and specific treatment.