Anonymous letter

“ It is generally agreed that an anonymous letter should be treated with silent contempt, and cast aside as the malicious lies of a coward who dares not say to a man’s face what he secretly commits to paper, and forces upon him. ”

“ Noel Vanstone rates my invaluable assistance at too low a figure, here I remain, biding my time till my fair relative wants me, or till I make her want me, which comes to the same thing. If the anonymous letter falls by any accident into her hands, she will find disparaging allusions in it to myself, purposely introduced to suggest that the writer must be one of the persons whom I addressed while conducting her inquiries. ”

“ An anonymous letter concerning some matter of vital importance to the recipient will rarely leave him at ease until events have adduced their final evidence on one side or the other; mystery wholly impenetrable will often exert a moral influence which no lucidity of argument, no open appeal, could ever have attained. ”

“ The trouble to which anonymous letter-writers put themselves to attain their ends must sometimes be very great. I remember a case in which some of these people must have contrived by means of spies or agents to procure a private address in a foreign country, and must have been at great pains also to ascertain certain facts in England which were carefully mingled with the lies in the calumnious letter. ”

“ Bowles that the intention was to annoy him; but I fear that this was answered by his notice of the reception of the criticism. An anonymous letter-writer has but one means of knowing the effect of his attack. In this he has the superiority over the viper; he knows that his poison has taken effect, when he hears the victim cry;—the adder is deaf. The best reply to an anonymous intimation is to take no notice directly nor indirectly. ”

“ It occurred to me that before taking the step of expelling Percival from the school, it would be as well to make one more effort to find out who is the culprit.
"A few weeks ago, I received an anonymous letter suggesting that Percival should be questioned as to what he was doing on the night that part of the Black Book, and other documents, disappeared from my desk. As a rule, I take no heed of anonymous communications. The testimony of any one who is ashamed to put his name to a letter is, as a rule, worthless. ”

“ Admaston long before Mrs. Admaston and her friends reached Folkestone—let alone Boulogne. The letter is dated March 23rd, and it is unsigned. Now, gentlemen, an anonymous letter is open to grave suspicion, but in the peculiar circumstances of this case the fact of its being anonymous makes no difference. ”

“ Now, a man who, to injure another, will write an anonymous letter, is, in the first place, a coward, and, in the second place, a villain. Many of these offensive anonymous letters you see in the bad newspaper have been found to be written in the editorial chair. ”

“ Anonymous communications are both cowardly and ill-bred. Under no circumstances should they be written. The fire is the only fit asylum for them when received. The Gunpowder Plot might have been revealed openhandedly, and the anonymous letter even in that case nearly missed its aim. The only anonymous communications which can be tolerated are the harmless missives called valentines. ”

“ Kindly permit me space to answer an anonymous letter which came to me last Sunday concerning a young man in whom I am deeply interested, having been instrumental in procuring his parole recently, and who is in every way traduced to me by the writer, who styles himself or herself a Christian and signs the letter, "A friend to all." ”

“ It was the girl who hit on the idea of sending a letter to the police. She said that it would be the best thing to do, because if they were informed and went to the house and discovered the body it wouldn't be so difficult for me to face them afterwards. I agreed to that, and so did Birchill, who was very frightened in case I might give anything away, and consented on that account. The girl showed us how to write the letter, too—she said she'd often heard of anonymous letters being written that way—and she brought out three different pens and a bottle of ink and a writing pad. ”

“ In the letter that angles for an inquiry, do not tell too much. Whet the appetite and arouse the curiosity. Make them hungry to learn all about it, make them come back like Oliver Twist and ask for more. But it is fatal to paint a proposition in such brilliant colors that there is a chance for disappointment when the prospect gets his additional information. Nor should an offer of a free booklet or free samples be made so alluring that the letter will be answered out of idle curiosity when the recipient is really not a prospect at all. ”

“ DEAREST DONALD,—I received your kind letter. That you are doing well, and saving money for the purpose you speak of, it is pleasant to hear. That you still love me is what is dearest to my heart. I may confess in this letter what I could scarcely ever say in your presence, that I think of you always. All our old walks are eloquent of the calm and happy past. ”

“ While letters take the place of spoken language, they lack the animation and the personal magnetism of the speaker—a handicap that must be overcome by finding words and arranging them in sentences in such a way that they will attract attention quickly, explain a proposition fully, make a distinct impression upon the reader and move him to reply. Out of the millions of messages that daily choke the mails, only a small per cent rise above the dead level of colorless, anemic correspondence. ”

“ This is an effective attention-getter, but unless carefully printed the impersonality is apparent.
In certain kinds of communications where the more formal customs of social correspondence are sometimes employed, the letter is often opened with the salutation, "My dear Sir." The full name and address is then written in the lower left corner, in alignment with the paragraphs of the body of the letter.
Some businesses, presenting a proposition to a limited number of persons, write the entire first paragraph. It is usually short and of course should be made pointedly personal. ”

“ Letters from the wives of presidents, from prominent bankers and men in the public eye he has reproduced in miniature, and two or three of these are enclosed with every sales letter.
An office appliance firm with a wealth of good testimonials to draw on sends each prospect letters of endorsement from others in his particular line of business. A correspondence school strengthens its appeal by having a number of booklets of testimonials each containing letters from students in a certain section of the country. ”

“ So, if form letters are to escape the waste basket—if they are to win the prospect's attention and convince him—they must have all the ear-marks of a personally dictated communication. If a proposition is worth sending out it is worthy of a good dress and careful handling.
All the principles of making the individual letter a personal message hold good with the form letter, except that greater pains must be taken to make each letter look personal. Nothing should be put into the letter to a dozen or a thousand men that does not apply to each one individually. ”

“ Many correspondents keep within easy reach a folder or scrapbook of particularly inspiring letters, advertisements and other matter gathered from many sources. One man declares that no matter how dull he may feel when he reaches the office in the morning he can read over a few pages in his scrapbook and gradually feel his mind clear; his enthusiasm begins to rise and within a half hour he is keyed up to the writing mood.
A correspondent in a large mail-order house keeps a scrapbook of pictures—a portfolio of views of rural life and life in small towns. ”

“ By any one of these appeals, or better, by a combination of appeals, a letter can be given an individuality, a vitality, that will make it rise above the underbrush of ordinary business correspondence.
To begin with, vapid words and stereotyped expressions should be eliminated, for many a good message has become mired in stagnant language. So many correspondents, looking for the easiest road to travel, fall into the rut that has been worn wide and deep by the multitudes passing that way. The trouble is not the inability of writers to acquire a good style or express themselves forcibly ”

“ The farmer's mail is not so heavy but what he has time to read a long letter if it interests him, and so the successful correspondent fills two or three pages, sometimes five or six, and gives the recipient arguments and reasons to ponder over during his long hours in the field. One of the most successful men in the mail-order business sometimes sends out a seven-page letter, filled with talking points. ”

“ The little towns, my friend, where life is not very gay and people have the time to be interested in the affairs of their neighbours, have their own crimes, and perhaps the most pernicious of them all is the crime of anonymous letters. ”

“ Here it is the policy to get up close to the reader by a "you-and-me" attitude. Some mail-order houses have letters written in the name of the company, signed by the writer as department manager, sales manager, or other officer. Then there are other houses that omit the company name entirely in order to get away from the "soulless corporation" idea as much as possible, and letters to a customer are always signed by the same individual to get a personal relationship that is considered a most valuable asset. ”

“ Under such circumstances, Gentlemen, the original letter having been searched for, and not being to be found, that, in point of law, lets in the copy of it, which could not be admitted as evidence as it existed. She is then asked whether the letter received was in the hand writing of Mr. Church? and she says, “I have seen his writing. I have seen him write in different hands. He does not write always the same. I don’t mean to say exactly that he wrote in different hands; but there was such a difference in the same hand-writing that one would hardly think it was the same. ”

“ For many years before this, and until the end of his life, there was another side to his correspondence which deserves mention.
I wish that more of the queer letters, which arrived in never-failing streams, had been preserved. A favourite type was the anonymous letter. It prayed fervently, over four pages, that the Almighty would send him down quick into the pit, and was usually signed simply "A Lady." Others came from cranks of every species: the man who demonstrated that the world was flat, or that the atmosphere had no weight—an easy proof, for you weigh a bottle full of air ”

“ While primarily the postal mailing card is intended to aid the letter in many ways it does what the letter can never do. It can carry a design or an illustration without the least suggestion of effrontery, which a letter can not do without losing dignity. It can venture into clever schemes to cinch the interest. It is the acme of simplicity as means to win an inquiry. And withal it does its work at less cost than the letters. ”

“ Many businesses have grown so rapidly and the heads have been so absorbed in the problems of production and extending markets that little time or thought has been given to the work of the correspondents. And so it happens that in many concerns the correspondence is handled according to the whims, the theories and the personality of the various men who are in charge of the different departments. But there are other concerns that have recognized the desirability of giving individuality to all the mail that bears a house message. ”

“ If you received a dozen letters in your mail this morning it is probable that there were just twelve different angles to the appeals that were made. For most correspondents are not thinking about the man they are writing to but are concerned solely with thoughts about the propositions they have in hand—and that is why the great bulk of the letters that are opened in the morning pause at the desk only momentarily before continuing their way to the furnace room. ”

“ The letter-writer who can tap one of these lines of thought gets results in a flash. Such letter takes a basis of facts common to most men, blends them in the letter written, so as to form fixedly from the prospect's own ideas and experiences, a firm conviction that what the writer is saying is absolute truth. A single sentence that does not ring true to a man's experience is an obstacle over which the message will not carry.
A company selling land in the west, sent out a five-page letter— enough to smother whatever interest might have been attracted by the advertisement. ”

“ Just as progressive business houses now aim to have their correspondence uniform in policy and quality, so too, they aim at uniformity in letter appearance—the mechanical production. It is obvious that if the letters sent out by a house are to have character, one style must be adopted and definite rules must be formulated for the guidance of the stenographers. ”

“ The letter that can do that, a letter so clever and so convincing that it makes a man a thousand miles away put his hand into his pocket, take out his hard earned cash and buy a money order; or makes the shrewd man at the desk take up his pen, write a check and send it for the goods you have to sell, is a better employee than your star salesman because it gets the order at a fraction of the cost. And the man who can write the letter that will do that is a power in the business world—his capacity is practically unlimited. ”

“ The letter is today the greatest potential creator and transactor of business in the world. But wide as its use is, it still lies idle, an undeveloped possibility, in many a business house where it might be playing a powerful part.
The letter is a universal implement of business—that is what gives it such great possibilities. It is the servant of every business, regardless of its size or of its character. It matters not what department may command its use—wherever there is a business in which men must communicate with each other, the letter is found to be the first and most efficient medium. ”