More emphasis should be placed on teaching letter writing in schools

In school, I was just a mediocre student. With the kind of grades I was getting in school, it makes me wonder, did I ever learned anything from school? Surprisingly, I did! I learned how to write good persuasive letters. During my school days, the teachers placed a lot of emphasis on writing letters. We started learning how to write letters in Standard One (Grade One). The teachers taught us to be creative and how to set up the purpose and the contents of the letter. The teachers also taught us how to use paragraphs effectively. In Malaysia, the students are taught to number their paragraphs so that it can be clearly seen. The reader of the letter will then be able to follow your thought process and see your argument moving from one point to the other.

In my later years, I found my “skill” in writing good, effective and persuasive letters have helped me tremendously in filing successful applications and generally, getting the other side to respond promptly to my letters. Strangely and embarrassingly I didn’t realize this until recently, which prompted me to write this post.

Last week, my daughter was lodging an application, so I asked her to prepare a covering letter to accompany her application form. When she showed me her letter, I found there was something not right with the letter. The letter was grammatically correct and there was no spelling mistake but somehow it didn’t look quite the kind of letter that I am accustomed to. So what I did was that I started making changes in her letter and returned it to her. While making the changes, I finally figured out why the the letter was strange. The letter was not written like a proper formal letter. It was written more like an email. Don’t get me wrong, the sentences were constructed perfectly without any use of short SMS language but the format of the letter was not correct. It did not state the purpose of the letter, no heading and it didn’t say the letter was from whom. By no means am I a perfectionist but there are certain things in the letter that cannot be ignored. It is my view that if one wants to be treated professionally, one has to project that image and yes, that includes writing a formal letter.

When I asked my wife and children whether letter writing is taught in school, they replied in the affirmative. However, it is nothing compared to what I have learned during my school days. When I was in school, there was a lot of emphasis placed on this topic, ie: letter writing. We learned proper letter writing from primary school right up to secondary school. Perhaps, I am from old school, but I feel that proper emphasis should be given to teaching letter writing. Believe it or not, it will help you in more ways than one when you go out to the working world. So, to all my teachers who taught me how to write a proper letter, thank you very much!