I’m not sure who to blame. His mother, perhaps, or the public school system. But it turns out that my son — days away from graduating from high school — does not know how to send mail through the U.S. Postal Service. I am not making this up. The boy has a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop, does some basic coding, is pretty good at computer-assisted design and gets excellent grades. But a letter? Forget about it — he doesn’t even know how to properly address an envelope.

The only reason I discovered this is because his mother and I told him it was appropriate to send graduation announcements to his grandparents, aunts and uncles.

First, he wrote the mailing address on the top right of the envelope — and only the address, no name. I corrected him, fatherly, handing him a fresh envelope: “The mailing address goes in the center. It has to be personalized.”

Success! I then handed him a stamp: “A stamp is required.” He placed it, carefully, in the top left corner of the envelope.

“That’s not where it goes!” I was beginning to lose patience. We started again—though I told him he owed me $0.50 for the ruined stamp. This time, he printed the name and address, correctly, in the center of the envelope. Next, he carefully placed the stamp on the top right, as I instructed.

So far so good: “Now put the return address on the top left.” I said. “Print clearly, please.”

He stared back at me. “What’s a return address?” I breathed in, deeply. “A return address is your address. Our address.”

“They’re not sending this envelope back to me, are they?” he asked.

“It’s required by the Post Office!” I barked. He rolled his eyes with an obscene level of teenage skepticism.

I took the completed letter from him, deciding it best that I personally take it to the post office.

What’s happening here? How is it possible that the world’s most connected, most tech-savvy generation ever does not know how to mail a letter? What else don’t they know?

A. The art of the handwritten letter has largely fallen victim to the evolution of technology. Communications today have become more immediate and almost entirely digital. When I went off to college, I would communicate with friends at far-flung locations by writing and mailing letters and responding to their own letters. Phone calls were few and far between because long distance rates were so high.

Today, Skype can be used at low cost to talk to friends overseas. Email lets you stay in touch with friends in every corner of the country and the globe virtually instantly at no significant cost. Text messaging on cell phones even permits instant feedback on the latest concert or movie — while you’re still in your seat.

What do we lose with the decline of letter writing? 

Spelling. Text messaging discourages correct spelling. Email and word processing provides automated spell-checking capability, so as long as you type something in the neighbourhood of what is correct, you’re probably all set.

Writing letters with pen and paper offers no such safety net. It forces you to focus on spelling correctly.

The Value of Words. Words matter. When writing a letter, it is important to consider how the words will be interpreted on the other end by the recipient. A single back-and-forth exchange would easily take at least a week — often more. That doesn’t leave much room to clear up misunderstandings quickly, so it forces us to focus more on what we say. Email and text messages are now so easy to send with quick-fire responses that the significance of one’s words is often overlooked, sometimes with a negative effect.

The Power of Connecting. In the electronic world, we have many more connections, but we often take them for granted. We bounce from one email or tweet to the next and we think we are connecting. And we are. But it isn’t on the same level as if you were to take 30 minutes crafting a letter to someone. While that letter is being written, the person you are communicating with is at the top of your mind. You are focused on that single relationship. 

Now, I’m not saying we should drop electronic communications and move back to the handwritten letter. But we would all do well to consider what we have lost as this art has disappeared and think about how we might incorporate the best of it into our current communications arsenal.

B. During our country’s first century, letters were sometimes the only communication afforded to family members, separated by miles and oceans. In the last century telephones replaced the need for letters, but letters were still being written. Children participated in pen-pal programmes, enriching their insight into other cultures, while practising their writing skills. My own mother, now eighty, had a pen-pal from Australia, when she was a young girl.

When I was a teenager, I wrote letters all the time. Our family had moved to a remote location, which didn’t include a phone line. I soon learned that to receive a letter, I had to write one first, and mail it.

But as the current younger generation began to grow up, rumbles about the decline of the written word were often heard, with the blame focused on cell phones and the Internet.

I must disagree with that line of thinking. Just about everyone is writing these days. They are writing blogs, “how to” articles, content for websites, emails, forums, message boards, MySpace and Facebook profiles, everywhere. Suddenly, everyone is a writer.

Cell phone text messaging and different online chat programmes are now blamed for bringing us those annoying shortcuts like cyl and b4. My son, now twenty-nine, grew up with the computer. He text messages, and will use those annoying shortcuts. But, he also sends me emails, which for his generation, is the same as writing a letter. I am happy to say, his emails aren’t littered with text speak, nor are his sister’s.

The written word is not headed for extinction. It is evolving and touching more lives than in previous centuries. From a historical perspective, it was not that long ago that literacy amongst the general public was the exception, not the rule.

Rejoice, there is a new generation of writers on the horizon.