Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/21

 inquiring how to eliminate hazing, or to discourage Theta Nu Epsilon, and one has in it about as much individuality as the other. Usually both of them are typewritten, for the college president has a stenographer and the laundress has a daughter in high school who uses a typewriter.

We write ten letters now where we wrote one fifty years ago. It is the way we do business, it is the way we keep in touch with our friends, and perform our social obligations. Ultimately we shall pay a social call by writing a letter. Perhaps we shall hear our sermons by correspondence. But the increase in the number of letters we write has not improved our epistolary style; it has on the contrary made our writing more mechanical, less intimate, less personal and individual. If we have a stenographer she assumes all responsibility for our spelling, our punctuation, our sentence structure, and in fact for everything else excepting the bald business facts which our letters contain.

"How do you spell 'ammonia'?" I heard one of his employees ask a business man not long ago.