Monthly Archive for January, 2003

Al Franken, in his most recent book, Oh The Things I Know…, extols the value Per­sonal Hand­writ­ten Notes, as a means of net­work­ing. He calls atten­tion to the fact that Pres­i­dent Bush (the Elder) made it a rou­tine in his life from the time he left Yale to write thou­sands of these notes to friends and sup­port­ers. And he became Direc­tor of the CIA, Ambas­sador to the UN, Vice Pres­i­dent, and Pres­i­dent. Let’s leave aside the notion that he might have actu­ally per­formed any of these duties sat­is­fac­to­rily, and con­sider Mr. Franken’s point:

It is so easy to send Email these days — click, typey typey, click, SENT! This devel­op­ment has con­tributed pos­i­tively to increased pro­duc­tiv­ity — as anyone who had to fiddle occa­sion­ally with a fax machine can attest. Yet, there are some very notice­able dis­con­nects even with this most ‘connected’ of all recent inventions.

First, because it’s easy to send mes­sages elec­tron­i­cally, it is just as easy to ignore them. How many people are as dili­gent with their Inbox count as they are with there check­book bal­ance? Ok, bad exam­ple in my case. But the point is sound — which brings me to…

Point two, Email affords very little per­sonal con­nec­tion, when com­pared with the writ­ten note. You can’t hold a piece of Email, nor appre­ci­ate the qual­ity of the paper or hand­writ­ing. Instead, typog­ra­phy is stan­dard­ized to Arial, indi­vid­ual flour­ish is restricted to the oblig­a­tory ‘e-signature’, and you get sev­eral hun­dred junk mes­sages a week, trying to sell you pornog­ra­phy, mort­gage rates, and a fake uni­ver­sity diploma.

Third, how many people actu­ally take the time to hand­write notes any­more? Mar­garet Shep­ard writes in her book
The Art of the Hand­writ­ten Note, that it’s a mis­con­cep­tion that you don’t have the time. Ask your­self this: doesn’t it seem more sin­cere and extra­or­di­nary that some­one would take the time to send you a per­sonal hand­writ­ten note? That’s worth a few extra min­utes, and a walk to the post office.

Lastly, how good do you feel last time you sent an Email note to some­one? Today, I bought these nice note-​cards with a small lith­o­graphed image on the front, and I hand-​wrote notes to two people that have recently inter­viewed me for jobs. Now that they’re in the mail­box, I feel pos­i­tively giddy about these nice people open­ing their notes. It’s some­thing spe­cial and mem­o­rable, in an oth­er­wise rou­tine day.

There was some­thing funny about writ­ing these notes, how­ever, because it’s been so long since i’ve hand-​written any­thing longer than a cheque. In recent years, I’ve got quite good at sign­ing my name at the bottom of typed cover-​letters, sales inquiries and let­ters to the editor. My hand­writ­ing, once some­what pass­able, was atro­cious! It took a lot of warm­ing up and prac­tic­ing until I felt com­fort­able with the result. Cur­sive was totally out of the ques­tion, so I affected a kind of more styl­ized printing.

In a bad job-​climate, I think there is power in the Little Hand-​Written Note.