It’s Ironic, Perhaps, But Writing Skills Are Still Important

When I was growing up, my parents considered long-distance phone calls expensive, wasteful and extravagant, something to be reserved for emergencies. Better to write a letter, they would add.

Whenever anybody did place a long-distance call, he or she would whisper: “Hurry up! It’s long distance! It’s costing a fortune!”

My brother and I would be filled with fear that every syllable uttered by us threatened the family with bankruptcy.

Whether you were calling or receiving it, long-distance calling was a luxury. If you absolutely had to make one, you had better do it quickly and forget the chitchat. Postage was much cheaper.

Times have changed, haven’t they? We now make long-distance calls for almost no reason and think nothing of it.

But if you look at the cost of a one-minute coast-to-coast call, telephoning is actually more economical than writing, and certainly requires less effort. Miss Manners notwithstanding, the last thing most people want to do is craft letters and post them to distant destinations.

A half-ounce letter cost three cents to mail in 1863. The price actually went down to two cents later that year, although two years later it went back to three cents.

It took 83 years before the cost of that stamp doubled in 1968. By 1971, it had increased to eight cents.

In very rough figures, then, postal costs doubled in about one century, then quadrupled in the past 24 years.

To be fair, Congress set postal rates long before the U.S. Postal Service was created and told to set prices sufficient to finance its own operations. Until then, Congress simply borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. It was great while it lasted.

Today, it costs about 15 cents a minute to make a night or weekend call from, say, Washington state to Washington, D.C. That’s a lot less than it was 10 or 20 years ago. I love to see costs go down. But the blessings of technology have a downside, too.

Some would say that a society of telephone gluttons risks losing the art of writing. We read and hear about how our school children, by and large, cannot read, write or express themselves as well as the preceding generation, and the “experts” warn us we are heading toward educational extinction.

Fear not! It seems that technology has come to the rescue of the almost-lost art of writing.

Now that phone costs are so low - compared with the alternatives, at least - telecommunicating is increasingly popular and economical. And to be effective in the information age, good written communication skills are essential.

The more people send and receive computer messages, the more verbal skills will be used, practiced, refined and relied upon.

Just when it seems our kids won’t have to worry anymore about such junk as proper grammar, agreement of subject and verb, tenses, objects, prepositional phrases, etc., technology brings us full circle and demands good written communication.

It’s as though the board of education hatched a conspiracy with Microsoft to start educating us.

xxxx