Dear Mum and Dad, I hope you are both well ... was the way the hand written letters used to start. I was at boarding school at the time and once a week we were given letter writing lessons which included a one hour "practical" when we were required to send at least one letter home.

The letter writing format was formal and the outgoing address always had to be positioned neatly in the top right hand corner of the page with the date set dead central in the middle of the page.  The sign off (considering it was to the parents) was also formal and finished yours faithfully.

My parents paid a fortune for the privilege of having a son who could string a sentence together in neat, legible and hand written English. They would go as far as complaining to the headmaster if their weekly "update" letter didn’t arrive promptly each week from their son.

Perhaps I am old fashioned but I do enjoy receiving hand written letters from friends and family, although over the years the amount of these has diminished in number to almost zero, barring Christmas cards and birthday letters, and email appears to be the number one form of communication.

These days I receive email and lots of it. When I take a week off work I am guaranteed to come back to the office to find at least four or five hundred emails (excluding spam) that need my attention and responses. The world has gone mad for it.

On an average day when I return home I will visit my letter box and feel lucky to find anything other than the unwanted junk mail and bills which are the only regularly visitors to said letter box. I can often go a whole week without bothering to check as I know that these days’ people just don’t consider letter writing as an effective form of communication.

So, on returning home having bypassed the letter box and gone through the pleasantries of greeting my wife I will make a cup of coffee, sit in the lounge, open my laptop and spend almost an hour, firstly sifting through unwanted junk email and trying to get through the ever increasing titles of; "Your long lost Nigerian Uncle has left you $10 million we just need your bank details to transfer the funds!!" and then looking through the reams of both wanted and unwanted email, responding to which take up a good portion of my spare time.

Which is better; Letter writing or email?

I have on occasion been misinterpreted via email and dependent upon an individual’s mood at the time of receipt, various different shades of light are cast upon the interpretation of what has been said. I believe this is not so with a hand written letter.

Letter writing in itself used to be an art form, you could sense a person’s personality and mood just by examining how hard they pressed upon the paper or the sweeping of the tails on individual letters. Obviously, letter writing is a time consuming past time and therefore one can understand the need in this busy world in which we live, for a more effective form of communication to be adopted. Letters go missing in the post and can take weeks, even with today’s modern postal services, to reach their destination. But I always get a sense that those who have taken the time to write a letter generally have thought their comments through making it in my mind a more sincere mode of communication.

Alas, these days letter writing appears to be an almost distant memory, except when the season dictates for something more personal. Even last year I noted that many Christmas cards came in a typed format with a prepaid envelope, I therefore fear that even this universal and age long tradition may soon pass us by.

Email started off as a wondrous new innovation, one might almost say it revolutionised modern day communications, but I wonder more and more these days whether the very technology invented to make us more efficient, has in fact made us less efficient due to the ease of pressing the word "SEND" without giving due consideration to a message.

I have earned the unenviable title of being the biggest single hoarder of email within my business with files only reaching back 18 months but extending to almost 30,000 email. The resource to keep on my "stockpile" of communications alone would probably light up a village for a week! Unfortunately, as I keep stating to the I.T. team at my place of work, if I am to be challenged on any decision, I must continue to have the resource to defend my position or in fact challenge others, and this is where the system falls down.

With email today one feels duty bound to read each individual correspondence and quite often obliged to reply. Subjects not on an agenda can overnight become the centre of an all too busy diary due to comments made and communicated half way across the world in an unrelated and misinterpreted email conversation that occurred moments ago. There appears to be no limits to the level of destruction one can cause simply by getting an opinion registered in the correct inbox at an inappropriate time, and they regularly put the proverbial "spanner" in my all too busy works.

The title of this post is email vs letter writing, they each have their use, but I am inclined to say that if the same thought processes associated with traditional letter writing could be applied and enforced upon those let loose with a keyboard and email address then perhaps a reasonable balance could be struck.

Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely to happen and my life and career could not continue to function at the same pace without the benefits of an email system, yet, even with that knowledge, I remain deeply in favour of a return to ink and paper.