Writing is on the wall for the humble letter and pen

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Two thirds of young British adults say that they use a pen less than five times a week – and more than a quarter prefer emojis to words when expressing their feelings.
If that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about the world and the hell we’re headed to in a handcart, nothing will.
Of course, texting a little emoji of a tear falling from a round yellow face is easier than actually having to write the words: “I’m sad” – but how can it be that little cartoon characters have surpassed the written word?
The survey – carried out for the cruise company Cunard for that sparingly celebrated annual event called National Writing Day – found that one in four people have neither sent nor received a handwritten letter in the past decade.
One presumes this excludes school reports – or have they too been relegated to a series of emojis . . . the devil’s scarlet face if you failed, an angel for an ‘A’ and a whole series of clappy hands if the overall result was worth celebrating?
Does it exclude cards for Christmas or birthdays or Valentine’s Day – or is it now acceptable to just send a love-heart followed by a big ‘U’ to cover all such occasions of soul-baring?
But most upsetting of all is the admission that 65 per cent of those aged between 25 and 34 hardly ever pick up a pen.
It’s no surprise therefore than almost none of them can spell; when they use their phone, they rely on the auto-correct function to do the work for them. Which might explain the increasing number of American spellings in phone messages.
Apart from spelling, the other consequence is a hopeless deterioration in handwriting standards, to the point that even a doctor would struggle to read it – and they have perfected the prescription scrawl.
On the other side of the coin, 89 per cent said they would love to receive more handwritten letters – although given that none of them want to send them, you’d have to wonder where they expect them to come from – and 70 per cent have held on to letters received in the past.
Thus, it would appear that the death of the letter isn’t so much down to the advent of phone technology as much as pure laziness.
And in fairness, when you can record your deepest thoughts with nothing more than your thumb – sending it instantly to the other side of the world – it’s hard to see the motivation for finding writing paper and a pen, an envelope and a stamp and traipsing halfway across town to a post office.
But there’s something wonderful about the written word – and part of that is the planning, thought and effort that someone has made because they believed you to be worth it.
There are thousands of teenage boys and girls in the Gaeltacht right now, learning Irish – and for the first time they are also experiencing the joy of a letter.
Because their phones and tablets are under lock and key, their only communication with the outside world is via a letter from home where the news, by its nature, is three days old and arguably of little significance anyway.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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