Chapter 7　Social Letter Writings

The social letters which are written to relations and intimate friends should be written in an easy,conversational style.The social letters are really of the nature of friendly chat:and,being as a rule unpremeditated and spontaneous compositions, they are informal and free-and-easy as compared with essays.Just as in friendly talks,as in friendly letters,people can touch on many subjects and in any order they like.And they use colloquial expressions which would in formal essays be quite out of place.

But this does not mean that people can be careless and slovenly in dashing off our letters.Actually,it is insulting to ask a friend to decipher a badly written,illcomposed and confusing scrawl.

Above all,it must be remembered that,however free-and-easy may be our style, people are as much bound by the rules of spelling,punctuation,grammar and idiom in writing a letter as we are in writing the most formal letter.Such ungrammatical expressions as“an advice,those sort of things and he met my brother and I”are not permissible both in a friendly letter and in a business letter.Mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar at once stamp a letter-writer as uneducated.