New Britain herald., 1916-03-17
EXPERIMENTING.
The Commentator, in New London Day, Has a Few Pertinent Re-
 marks on Gentle Art.

marks on Gentle Art.
 Letters, even making no account of dunning letters, are generally the most unsatisfactory of things. One sits down to talk, on paper, to an absent friend. In about ninety-nine cases in a hundred he doesn't talk to the absent friend in a manner in the remotest degree resembling the manner in which he would talk to him in person. Simply because he is using pen instead of his tongue for the expression of his thoughts he proceeds to climb Up on tall verbal stilts and to get fussy and stiff in the choice of language. He isn't en- terlng literary contest of any sort; he merely wants to write to his friend because he wants to talk to him; but for some unaccountable reason he gets the Authorization that conver- satlon that would be entirely sats- factory to his friend in direct inter- course is not good enough in papcr and ink form. Consequently he write a, letter that causes the friend to grunt and inquire, What t he exclamation point! Does the man think I'm a class in English com position ?"
 Only once in a while is there person who writes as he or she talks or, whats more to the point as he or she thinks. And who wants to get, from friend whose especial charm perhaps, is the pinwheel qual- lty Of his mental processes; who sputters and calculates and jumps from phrase to phrase with only one purpose in the use of language, the purpose to convey thought---who wants to get from this kind of person a prim and conventionalized letter that sounds like lie and looks like masquerade costume? Nobody.
 generation or two ago sundry enemies of the human race, disguised as elem entary high brows, inflicted on mankind a series of publications purporting to show folks how to write letters. Ready letter w~..crs," compendiums, manuals, guides, etc, the books were called. and they should have gone straight from the binders hands to the furnace fire pot. Because they had the most demoralizing effect on the custom of letter writing, affecting as they did that there was an "art'' of letter writ ing and pretending to teach it. They did an evil world of harm to the honest expression of thought between individual and individual by convinc- ing the majority of people in this country that there were such things as proper form and improper forms in letter writing and actually coerc- ing the individual into hiding his in- dlvidualty in a shoddy mass of arti- fciality.
 I know perfectly we'll that there are plenty of middle aged people who even yet suffer from the effects of this bogus propaganda of the pat tern letter makers. They got the habit young and they cannot break it. The moment they 'take pen in hand" their thoughts begin to ooze instead of flowing like irrigation water, in ditches prepared for them by custom. Never a bubble or a ripple of ori- ginality. Their minds may be bound ing cascades until they drop down to the letter writing plane; there they suddenly go stagnant.
 And I suspect that though the let ter writing manuals are less in evl- dence than they used to be, the evil they have done lives after them: the sins of the parents are visited on the children; because even the kids I have observed. are very seldom nat ural or at ease in a letter.
 Why not? Tn the name of all that is sane, why not be easy and natural? Tn a private letter to a friend, what do you care whether your diction is correct or not? That doesn't worry you when you are talking to him, does it? If it were going to fuss him it would fuss him as we'll to hear you commit g, barbarisn as to read it in what you have written? Lit erary style, good form, letter style? Stakes alive man. What do you care about them-what you have to think about is merely yourself and your friend
 If you are writing to friend for goodness sake write your letter let Mrs. Grundy or the last generations tutelary genius or somebody else's notions of et1- quette or propriety write it for you; or have anything to do with it. What your friends want, in letters from you, is yourself, not somebody else or something else. Turn yourself loose and go to it and be hanged to the odds!
 The Comm entator,
 Special Fri and Sat. dozen strictly nd