Everybody Loves Snail Mail

      I never read the link attached to the prompt, but as soon as I saw the question "When is the last time you received a hand written letter?" on Mr. Mullins's blog suggestions, I knew that it was mine to answer. I, Rebecca Anne Smiley, am probably the world's biggest advocate of hand written letters. To answer the question at hand, the last time I received a letter was a little less than two days ago. So why do I love letters so much? The list could go on for days, but my top reason is that they mean so much more than a text or an email or any other electronic form of communication that has replaced the snail mail belonging to years far before our generation. Here is why: Any one of us could just turn on our computer and begin typing and simply press "send" when we wish to contact someone. A letter, however, takes so much more effort than this. When someone writes a letter, rather than just sending a message like "hey watsup man?", they're sending a page full of their own thoughts that don't need to be immediately replied to. These thoughts are complex and they're thought out, and rather than just having a fragment of what your counterpart wants to communicate to you, you have an entire document in which they express themselves. As well, in writing letters, the writers are encouraged to communicate ideas in an eloquent manner that we have become quite accustomed to abandoning completely whilst conversing through the screen of a phone or a computer. Further, because there is no quick reply option, the writers of letters are forced to complete entire thoughts. Letters encourage thought complexity and have genuine meaning, whereas electronic mail encourages the utmost simplicity in communication. My favorite things about letters, despite all of this, is that you can keep them forever. An email can be printed, but that wastes ink and the originality of that person's handwriting and spelling skills are lost. A text can be saved, but we all know that phones don't last forever. So yeah, let's keep the snail mail going.