22 Look Out, Email. Handwritten Letters Are Making a Comeback
Learning Outcomes
- Apply the reading process to “Look Out, Email. Handwritten Letters Are Making a Comeback.”
- Summarize the article.
- Respond to the article.
- Connect the ideas in the article to another text.
- Apply the ideas in the article by sending someone a handwritten note or letter.
Preview the Article
Follow the steps below to preview the article “Look Out, Email. Handwritten Letters Are Making a Comeback.” Ideally, you should print a copy and write your responses in the margins of the printed copy. To read more about previewing, visit the chapter on previewing a reading.
- Read the title and subtitle. What do they make you think about? What do you think the article is about? What questions do you have? Record your predictions and questions on the printed copy of the article near the title.
- This article discusses the LA Pen Pal Club. Visit their website to learn more about the group. You may also want to Google “pen pal clubs” to see what else you can learn prior to reading the article. Record any discoveries you make on the printed copy of the article.
- Read the first four paragraphs, which serve as an introduction to the article. What additional predictions do you now have about the article? What additional questions do you have? Record them on the printed copy of the article.
- Scan the bolded and underlined vocabulary in the article. If there are any words that you do not know well, look them up in a print or online dictionary and write some notes about their meanings on the printed copy of the article. Read the sentence containing each word to understand the word’s usage. Also, pay attention in your reading to words like stationery, which is used throughout the article beginning in paragraph 1. Stationery is commonly confused with stationary; the words have the same pronunciation. Pay attention to other commonly confused words when reading and writing.
- Based on your research about pen pal clubs and your preview of the article, what do you think is the central point of the article? (Don’t worry if you are not sure. This is a prediction or guess – you do not have to be correct as long as you are engaging your brain.) Record your prediction on the printed copy of the article.
- Based on your preview, do you predict that the article is narrative, expository, or argumentative?
Read Interactively
Now, read the article using the guidelines from the chapter on reading interactively. As you read, follow these steps to engage with the text.
- Pause to confirm or revise your predictions and to answer the questions you posed while previewing the article. Write down those revised predictions and responses to the questions as you read. If you cannot find the answers to your questions, save them for further research and discussion.
- Pause at other points to check for understanding of what you just read. Can you explain key ideas in your own words yet? If not, reread to clarify. Ideas that come later in a text build on the previous ones. Therefore, it makes no sense to keep reading if you did not understand something or if you became distracted. Anyone can become distracted while reading, so don’t hesitate to use the strategy of rereading when necessary.
- Pay attention to any vocabulary words that are confusing. Look up the words in a dictionary if they are interfering with your understanding, or mark them to return to later.
- Record any opinions or reactions you have to the reading in the margins of the article.
- Write down any further questions that develop as you read.
Look Out, Email. Handwritten Letters Are Making a Comeback
Handwritten correspondence is a patient, meaningful way to keep in touch. Photo by Annie Spratt/Unsplash
Pen pal clubs are growing across the U.S. But it’s not just the older generations who are joining them.
By Susan Abram
1 In the back room of a Los Angeles area stationery store, where handmade rubber stamps and intricate notecards line walls and shelves, more than a dozen people let pen and ink flow over fancy paper and envelopes.
2 “Thank you so much for the birthday goodies!” one member writes in a classic, almost calligraphy-style penmanship.
3 “How are you? How’s the weather?” another member scrawls in giant block letters.
4 Whether they write in cursive or old-school print, members of the LA Pen Pal Club drive for miles to meet one evening a month at Paper Pastries. Married or single, in their 20s or older, the mostly female members of the group said they get together to take part in what many would think is a long-lost art in an era of instantaneous communication: pouring out pieces of their lives in handwritten letters to loved ones, childhood friends, or those they’ve never met except through snail mail.
5 “I think people still get really excited about getting something in the mail,” said Chris Go, 50, a member of the group. She wrote to her college boyfriend off and on for 20 years, even after he moved to his native Philippines for a brief period. The two eventually married, and her husband is now also a member of the club.
6 “It’s a piece of you,” Go added. “Letters can even smell like the person sending them.”
7 The LA Pen Pal Club, one of more than an estimated two dozen similar clubs nationwide, made its premiere at Paper Pastries in 2015. Hosts Margaret Haas and Victoria Vu don’t arrange pen pals for people, but rather provide a friendly, social space for letter-writing enthusiasts to be in the company of others who share their interest. Haas, 33, owns Paper Pastries and had gotten the idea for the club while hosting a similar gathering at a gift shop where she worked. She met Vu, 34, at those gatherings. In addition to selling paper products, Haas also makes rubber stamps in-house with witty sayings and themes.
8 Both Haas and Vu said they were drawn to handwriting letters because they like the slower pace.
9 To Haas, writing a letter is unlike any other part of her life and is sort of paradoxical when she thinks about it.
10 “It is a solitary activity that leads to communication with another person,” she said. “Writing a letter by hand forces me to slow down, and I think more deeply about my thoughts as a result. I have worked through many issues by taking the time to share them with a pen pal. It is therapeutic that way.”
11 Handwritten correspondence is a patient, meaningful way to keep in touch, Vu added.
12 “It gives you the chance to wholeheartedly focus on the person you’re writing to, to channel your care into their hands via paper and pen,” she said.
13 “I never want to sit down and crank out that email,” Vu said. “I would rather write that letter.”
14 On one fall evening, LA Pen Pal Club members shared homemade cornbread and sipped virgin painkiller cocktails. Then they settled around a long table to write. Some of them embellished their notecards and envelopes with shiny heart stickers, others with simple sketches of flowers.
15 In days, their words and decorated envelopes will travel to cities and towns throughout Georgia and Virginia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania, among others.
16 Member Jo Bozarth, 37, said she’s been writing to her pen pal in Pittsburgh since she was 12 years old. They met through a classified ad in a teen magazine. Theirs is a friendship that has evolved without ever hearing each other’s voice or seeing each other face to face.
17 Through the handwritten word, they have shared laughs and tears through various milestones: boyfriends who came and went, new jobs, marriage, children who have grown, and parents and loved ones who have died. Bozarth said it has never occurred to her to contact her pen pal via Facebook or other social media.
18 Though the 140-year-old greeting card industry last had its heyday in the 1980s, sales are steady. Americans buy about 6.5 billion greeting cards each year, spending about $7 billion to $8 billion. Millennials in particular are opening new stores, and even experimenting with non-paper products, such as cards made of wood or metal.
19 “I have seen a significant trend toward new stationery companies being started by entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s, often women,” said Aaron Hazard, director of sales at the National Stationery Show. “There is a very strong, vocal, and engaged group of people in this age range who are getting back to the basics of paper and then reinventing what can be done with the medium.”
20 Though there is no hard data available, industry leaders said millennials also are purchasing more greeting cards. “Millennials purchase more greeting cards than any other generation,” said Peter Doherty, executive director for the Greeting Card Association. “We try to understand why that’s happening. We’ve come to the conclusion that millennials and Gen Y are looking for a more meaningful experience. We see that people are looking for something real, something lasting that can be personalized.”
21 As for the popularity of writing to pen pals, that too has endured and is even gaining in popularity, said Kathy Zadrozny and Donovan Beeson, founders of the Chicago-based Letter Writers Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving the cultural tradition of letter writing.
22 Formed in 2007, the alliance boasts 15,000 members and is growing. Interest in the group has been generated, in part, by word-of-mouth and social media, specifically from Instagram and Reddit, Zadrozny noted.
23 “It has been a gradual growth, but each year we see about a 20 percent uptick in membership from the previous year,” she said.
24 Members of the alliance are based all over the nation, but they’re mostly on the West Coast or in the Midwest and are between either 15 and 23 years old, or 45 and 85 years old.
25 “We certainly have letter writers in the ages in between, but those two age groups are the ones who join our group the most,” Zadrozny said, adding that the age range makes sense because of common transitions in those years.
26 “This is when you are either in high school or college or after your children leave for college or you leave your job,” she said. “These are the times where you are looking for those connections, the sparks with those who are interested in what you are interested in.”
27 Letter writing never went out of style, she added. “In taking the time to write a letter, you engage a different part of your mind. When you write, it feels nearly confessional. You say things on paper you wouldn’t otherwise say in person or via text.”
28 The members of the LA Pen Pal Club agree. Many of them say those cards and letters help them see unique traits and a different side of the sender.
29 “It’s really fun to see people write back to you, to see what their handwriting looks like,” said Colby Beck, 31. She began writing letters in college to keep in touch with a boyfriend, and the habit stayed with her.
30 “My dad writes in all caps. My mom is a cursive writer. My sister writes in bubble letters,” she said.
31 To Beck and other members of the group, the feel of pen and paper, and the time to write out thoughts and emotions, is invaluable.
Correction: March 14, 2019.
This article has been updated to accurately describe where Chris Go met her husband and where Margaret Haas got the idea for LA Pen Pal Club.
This article is republished from YES! Magazine under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Susan Abram is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and former newspaper reporter. Her stories have appeared in the Washington Post, the Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Daily News, among others.
Reflect
After reading the article, use the following questions to reflect on the content of the article and your reading process. See the chapter about reflecting for a discussion of why this is a crucial step.
- Try to paraphrase the main idea in a sentence. This may be challenging because you have read the article only once. If you are struggling, do your best. You can refine this when you reread and summarize the article.
- Is the article primarily narrative, expository, or argumentative? What is the purpose of the article? In other words, why do you think the author wrote it?
- Which predictions were accurate, and which did you have to revise?
- As you previewed the article, you wrote questions. What questions remain unanswered after reading the article?
- What else do you want to know about the article or topic of the reading? Write down any additional questions.
- How did previewing the article help you to understand and engage with the text while reading?
- Where did you struggle to understand something in the text, and how did you work through it?
- What, if anything, could you have done differently to improve your reading process?
Summarize
Complete a summary of the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Summarize before proceeding with the summary.
- Reread the article and complete the Summary Notes. See Preparing to Summarize for a review of this topic and an example.
- Then, use your Summary Notes to write a one-paragraph summary of the article. See Writing a Summary for a review of this topic and an example. Make sure that you include in-text citations and the Work Cited.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Summary to self-assess your summary or invite a peer to provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make changes to your summary.
Make sure you are comfortable with your summary before advancing to the response. If you misunderstand something in the article, then your response may be skewed based on that misunderstanding.
Respond
Write a response to the article by following these steps. Make sure you have read the chapters about Reading to Respond before proceeding with the summary.
- Use the Response Questions from Preparing to Respond to brainstorm possible ideas for your response. See the example in that same chapter.
- Read over your replies to the Response Questions. Choose one idea to write about in your response. Express that idea in a topic sentence. See Writing a Topic Sentence for a Response for examples. Ask a peer for feedback on your topic sentence.
- Brainstorm about possible support you could use in your response. See Generating Support for a Response for examples.
- Use your topic sentence and ideas from the list of support to write a one-paragraph response. See Writing a Response writing guidelines and examples. Make sure that you include the Work Cited and in-text citations for any quotes or specific ideas from the article.
- Use the self-assessment/peer review questions from Evaluating a Response to evaluate your response or have a peer provide feedback.
- Use the self-assessment or peer feedback to make improvements to your response.
Extend: Connect and Apply
Susan Abram writes about connecting with others through handwritten notes. Think about a friend or relative with whom you have lost touch. Reach out to that person by writing a handwritten letter or note to the individual. For example, you might reach out to an old friend or to a relative who lives far away.
Worried the person won’t be receptive? If so, you may want to read this research brief from The Conversation: “Lost Touch with Someone? Reach out – Your Friend Will Likely Appreciate It More Than You Think.” Authors Peggy Liu and Lauren Min found otherwise.