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A STAR BOOK
HOW TO WRITE
LETTERS
(Formerly THE BOOK OF LETTERS)
_A Complete Guide
to Correct Business and Personal
Correspondence_
BY
MARY OWENS CROWTHER
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK
CL
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The forms for engraved invitations, announcements, and the like, and the
styles of notepapers, addresses, monograms, and crests are by courtesy
of the Bailey, Banks and Biddle Company, Brentano's, and The Gorham
Company. The Western Union Telegraph Company has been very helpful in
the chapter on telegrams.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A LETTER? 1
CHAPTER II
THE PURPOSE OF THE LETTER 6
CHAPTER III
THE PARTS OF A LETTER
1. THE HEADING 10
2. THE INSIDE ADDRESS 12
3. THE SALUTATION 16
4. THE BODY OF THE LETTER 22
5. THE COMPLIMENTARY CLOSE 26
6. THE SIGNATURE 29
7. THE SUPERSCRIPTION 33
CHAPTER IV
BEING APPROPRIATE--WHAT TO AVOID
COMMON OFFENSES 36
STOCK PHRASES IN BUSINESS LETTERS 38
CHAPTER V
PERSONAL LETTERS--SOCIAL AND FRIENDLY
INVITATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 44
THE LETTER OF CONDOLENCE 91
LETTERS OF SYMPATHY IN CASE OF ILLNESS 95
LETTERS OF CONGRATULATION 101
LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION 107
LETTERS OF THANKS 110
LETTERS BETWEEN FRIENDS 118
CHAPTER VI
PERSONAL BUSINESS LETTERS 124
CHAPTER VII
THE BUSINESS LETTER 135
SALES AND ANNOUNCEMENT LETTERS 146
KEEPING THE CUSTOMER 160
SELLING REAL ESTATE 163
BANK LETTERS 173
LETTERS OF ORDER AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT 182
LETTERS OF COMPLAINT AND ADJUSTMENT 186
CREDIT AND COLLECTION LETTERS 193
LETTERS OF APPLICATION 211
LETTERS OF REFERENCE 217
LETTERS OF INTRODUCTION 220
LETTERS OF INQUIRY 223
CHAPTER VIII
THE USE OF FORM PARAGRAPHS 227
CHAPTER IX
CHILDREN'S LETTERS 230
CHAPTER X
TELEGRAMS 236
CHAPTER XI
THE LAW OF LETTERS 247
CHAPTER XII
THE COST OF A LETTER 252
CHAPTER XIII
STATIONERY, CRESTS AND MONOGRAMS 258
LIST OF TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
In the business letterhead appear the name of the
firm, its address, and the kind of business engaged
in 11
Letterheads used by a life insurance company, a law
firm, and three associations 13
In the case of widely known firms, or where the name
of the firm itself indicates it, reference to the nature
of the business is often omitted from letterheads 14
Specimens of letterheads used for official stationery 27
As to the use of the symbol "&" and the abbreviation
of the word "Company," the safest plan in
writing to a company is to spell its name exactly as
it appears on its letterhead 42
Specimen of formal wedding invitation 48
Specimens of formal invitations to a wedding reception 51
Specimen of wedding announcement 54
Specimens of formal dinner invitations 60
Specimens of formal invitations "to meet" 63
Specimens of formal invitations to a dance 68
Specimens of business letterheads 140
Arrangement of a business letter (block form) 144
Arrangement of a business letter (indented form) 145
Specimens of business letterheads used by English
firms 207
Specimens of addressed social stationery 259
Specimens of addressed social stationery 260
The monograms in the best taste are the small round
ones, but many pleasing designs may be had in
the diamond, square, and oblong shapes 262
Specimens of crested letter and notepaper 263
Specimens of monogrammed stationery 266
Specimens of business letterheads 267
Department stores and firms that write many letters
to women often employ a notepaper size 270
Specimens of stationery used by men for personal
business letters 271
HOW TO WRITE LETTERS
CHAPTER I
WHAT IS A LETTER?
It is not so long since most personal letters, after an extremely formal
salutation, began "I take my pen in hand." We do not see that so much
nowadays, but the spirit lingers. Pick up the average letter and you
cannot fail to discover that the writer has grimly taken his pen in hand
and, filled with one thought, has attacked the paper. That one thought
is to get the thing over with.
And perhaps this attitude of getting the thing over with at all costs is
not so bad after all. There are those who lament the passing of the
ceremonious letter and others who regret that the "literary" letter--the
kind of letter that can be published--is no longer with us. But the old
letter of ceremony was not really more useful than a powdered wig, and
as for the sort of letter that delights the heart and lightens the labor
of the biographer--well, that is still being written by the kind of
person who can write it. It is better that a letter should be written
because the writer has something to say than as a token of culture.
Some of the letters of our dead great do too often remind us that they
were not forgetful of posterity.
The average writer of a letter might well forget culture and posterity
and address himself to the task in hand, which, in other than the most
exceptional sort of letter, is to say what he has to say in the shortest
possible compass that will serve to convey the thought or the
information that he wants to hand on. For a letter is a conveyance of
thought; if it becomes a medium of expression it is less a letter than a
diary fragment.
Most of our letters in these days relate to business affairs or to
social affairs that, as far as personality is concerned, might as well
be business. Our average letter has a rather narrow objective and is not
designed to be literature. We may, it is true, write to cheer up a sick
friend, we may write to tell about what we are doing, we may write that
sort of missive which can be classified only as a love letter--but
unless such letters come naturally it is better that they be not
written. They are the exceptional letters. It is absurd to write them
according to rule. In fact, it is absurd to write any letter according
to rule. But one can learn the best usage in correspondence, and that is
all that this book attempts to present.
The heyday of letter writing was in the eighteenth century in England.
George Saintsbury, in his interesting "A Letter Book," says:
"By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in
the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and
decadence--French and English--the very palmiest day of the art.
Everybody wrote letters, and a surprising number of people wrote letters
well. Our own three most famous epistolers of the male sex, Horace
Walpole, Gray, and Cowper--belong wholly to it; and 'Lady Mary'--our
most famous she-ditto--belongs to it by all but her childhood; as does
Chesterfield, whom some not bad judges would put not far if at all below
the three men just mentioned. The rise of the novel in this century is
hardly more remarkable than the way in which that novel almost wedded
itself--certainly joined itself in the most frequent friendship--to the
letter-form. But perhaps the excellence of the choicer examples in this
time is not really more important than the abundance, variety, and
popularity of its letters, whether good, indifferent, or bad. To use one
of the informal superlatives sanctioned by familiar custom it was the
'letter-writingest' of ages from almost every point of view. In its
least as in its most dignified moods it even overflowed into verse if
not into poetry as a medium. Serious epistles had--of course on
classical models--been written in verse for a long time. But now in
England more modern patterns, and especially Anstey's _New Bath Guide_,
started the fashion of actual correspondence in doggerel verse with no
thought of print--a practice in which persons as different as Madame
d'Arblay's good-natured but rather foolish father, and a poet and
historian like Southey indulged; and which did not become obsolete till
Victorian times, if then."
There is a wide distinction between a letter and an epistle. The letter
is a substitute for a spoken conversation. It is spontaneous, private,
and personal. It is non-literary and is not written for the eyes of the
general public. The epistle is in the way of being a public speech--an
audience is in mind. It is written with a view to permanence. The
relation between an epistle and a letter has been compared to that
between a Platonic dialogue and a talk between two friends. A great
man's letters, on account of their value in setting forth the views of a
school or a person, may, if produced after his death, become epistles.
Some of these, genuine or forgeries, under some eminent name, have come
down to us from the days of the early Roman Empire. Cicero, Plato,
Aristotle, Demosthenes, are the principal names to which these epistles,
genuine and pseudonymous, are attached.
Some of the letters of Cicero are rather epistles, as they were intended
for the general reader.
The ancient world--Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Rome, and Greece--figures
in our inheritance of letters. In Egypt have been discovered genuine
letters. The papyrus discoveries contain letters of unknowns who had no
thought of being read by the general public.
During the Renaissance, Cicero's letters were used as models for one of
the most common forms of literary effort. There is a whole literature of
epistles from Petrarch to the _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_. These are,
to some degree, similar to the Epistles of Martin Marprelate.
Later epistolary satires are Pascal's "Provincial Letters," Swift's
"Drapier Letters," and the "Letters of Junius."
Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Montagu, was the first Englishman
who treated letter writing as an art upon a considerable scale.
Modern journalism uses a form known as the "open letter" which is really
an epistle.
But we are not here concerned with the letter as literature.