As we celebrate National Card and Letter Writing Month this April, we’re reminded of the timeless beauty and emotional power of handwritten correspondence. In an era dominated by instant messages, there’s something profoundly human about the act of writing a letter, and about receiving one.
Few understand this better than author Roseanna Rolph, whose deeply personal new book, Dear Mr Snippet, brings to life the handwritten wartime letters exchanged between her grandparents, Rita and John, during the Second World War. A heartfelt tribute to the lost art of letter writing, Dear Mr Snippet is more than a historical memoir, it’s a love story, a family story, and a window into a time when the written word carried families through the hardest of days.
In this special guest post, Roseanna shares her reflections on the emotional and cognitive value of letter writing, inspired not only by her own experiences, but also by the remarkable archive of letters she inherited, emerald-green ink and all.
Roseanna says…
“When did you last handwrite personal letter and send it?
Addressed letter volumes in the UK have seen a consistent decline in the last decade, with a notable acceleration in recent years, dropping from 20 billion in 2004-05 to 6.6 billion in 2023-24. In an age of improved communication opportunities, reasons for this include the rise of email and digital communication, increased online shopping and e-commerce, and higher postage costs.
April is National Card and Letter Writing Month, used to promote the art of writing and communication through handwritten letters and cards. Its aim is to encourage people to reconnect with the tradition of writing letters and cards, fostering a sense of connection and appreciation for the written word.
For many years, letters were the primary mode of communication in both personal and business communication until telegraphy and internet communications replaced them. Historically they were written on a variety of materials throughout the ancient world, including metal, pottery fragments, animal skin, and papyrus. In more recent years primarily recorded on paper, either typed or handwritten.
Handwriting benefits many aspects of our mind, body, behaviours and reactions, with lots of cognitive benefits. The handwriting process aids us in our creativity, strengthens our memory, helps us to foster ideas and deeply process information, improves learning, and allows for reflection as we order our thoughts ready to share. It represents something of our personalities, including our turn of phrase and can be as distinctive as our signature.
When I discovered John and Rita’s letters, I immediately recognised the emerald-green ink as Rita’s trademark and delighted in seeing how she wrote a ‘r’ in cursive style, not removing the fountain pen from the paper. I loved seeing John’s hurried scrawl showing he was thinking faster than he was able to write and that by forming the letters less accurately he could quickly move onto recording the next thing he wanted to say. Sometimes you could see the speed or emotion in the handwriting and notice how the ink had started to dry out in the pen only to be refilled, subsequently creating letters in a darker shade of ink and taking you directly to the moment those words were recorded.
Handwriting letters enables us to express thoughts and share experiences, whilst taking the time to handwrite them shows the receiver that you value them and the relationship you have. It can sooth our nerves being a type of ‘graphotherapy’, and the constant dilemma of choosing the appropriate words exposes us to critical thinking. Writing by hand allows us to think more thoroughly about the information we are recording and encourages us to expand our thoughts and form connections between them which in turn leads to deeper processing.
When receiving a letter or card it can be a little bit more magical knowing that the sender has taken a moment and has held it whilst thinking of you. During the Second World War this must have meant even more to the recipients, together with the sharing of news. Perhaps keeping in touch with news of the family and changes in children as they were growing up in the hope they would not feel like strangers when they next met. Creating plans and making decisions, supporting one another’s morale, sharing a joke and giving thanks for small daily miracles. Steve Toepfer, of the University of Kent comments that not only is it good for the receiver of the letter but in the of writing genuine letters of gratitude “the more letter writing people do, the more they improve significantly on happiness and life satisfaction”.
Letters allow the writer to share observations, and to transport others to different places and times. They act as a record of the persons ‘voice’ and can become an archive of our lives for the future. Physical letters and cards last and feel more permanent than electronic communications and are possibly more likely to be kept, and a letter can be read again and again.
With much of our correspondence and records now being electronic will we leave future historians with a more limited view of what real people today were thinking and feeling. And I wonder… if just like John and Rita’s correspondence, one day a letter of yours might be found and used to retell a story or transport people back to another time. You never know – it might. It just might.”
Find out more about Roseanna and her new book, Dear Mr Snippet, at www.roseannarolph.com.
