WebJournal 3- Write Down Your Heart and Send It

A hand-written mail may be considered old-fashioned nowadays; however, this way of keeping in touch with a faraway friend is what I most prefer to. Two years ago, my friend, Grace, left for Canada to study mass communication. Even though she had already told us half a year earlier, still her leaving was abrupt to me. She and I did not make a promise that we must keep in touch with each other. Grace even did not give me her address, either. Nevertheless, her first letter arrived to my mailbox by my 19th birthday, August 10.
That was the beginning that I started to write her letter every month. From then on, many of my friends kept asking me why I use written mail instead of E-mail. They always said that a traditional mail wastes too much time on writing and delivering. That’s truth. Writing a whole page letter takes me almost two hours each time. I never deny that it needs a great deal of time to write a hand-written mail; however, I do not consider this as a hard work or inconvenient at all.
I always write with a pen which is full of ink. Though it may occasionally stains the paper, it makes the script of each word looks different and therefore vivid. As the different scale of the thickness of ink marks, the writing becomes more lifelike, as if the words are alive instead of merely cold, lifeless group of letters. As a result, I do not like to use correction tapes or correction pens, either. The reason is that they will ruin the harmony of the whole letter. Just imagine it: a white or blue letter paper which is filled with beautiful hand writing, somehow a few dead white points abruptly come out as if some lost kids straying in a wrong place. Thus, when I make some mistakes on my writing, I will just draw lines to cover it. Though many of my friends say that this will make the letter paper looked messy, I think this can let the receiver know that I am thinking carefully when I am writing and I am willing to display my thinking process. The touch of air mail letter paper is one of the reasons that why I prefer hand-written mail. When you hold the paper, you can feel the lightness and softness if it, which give me a kind of content while I am writing.
A hand-written mail not only can deliver the message, but also carry the writer’s feelings, while an e-mail cannot. You can feel a writer’s emotions from his/her writing, while a type letter delivered through the Internet can tell you nothing about its writer.
The time of sending an e-mail to another side on the earth takes merely few seconds, while sending a mail to Canada takes almost two weeks. By e-mail, you can receive and deliver your message very fast; however, the subjects you can talk as topics in your e-mails may soon be used up. Taking the correspondence with Grace as an example, when we wait the letters written by each other, many fun things or sad things or more thoughts about some specific issues may happen during the two weeks. We can write down these things to share with each other. As you write more and more letters, you can find that your writing and thoughts are getting more and more mature, while writing an e-mail is too fast and too convenient to rething and accumulate your thoughts and emotions.