Handwritten marketing works wonders for political candidates, but this article points to the longevity of personal handwritten notes in politics. The longevity that can come back to bite you.

Silly us. We thought it was technology – the frantic e-this and cyber-that – that would kill the slow and intimate delight that is the handwritten letter. But wrong again. It’s politics, it seems, that might do the foul deed.

There is some good insight throughout this article:

There’s no denying that such personal, handwritten missives possess power. More than emails, handwritten versions suggest intimacy and honesty and revelation.

“How very human were letters,” Cathleen Schine wrote in her novel The Love Letter. “Only we write letters.” Beasts may grunt or gesture. “But they don’t write love letters.”

It’s not for nothing, so rife are they with meaning, that stacks of them can be bound in elastic and saved, in chest or shoebox, for years, for lifetimes.

An email is quickly scanned, a letter studied. Is the paper an expensive bond carefully folded, or a scrap torn from a notebook? Does the chosen ink colour set a tone, the handwriting reveal mood or temperament? And does that scent of perfume, should a recipient be so lucky, hint at intent?

More:

There seems a yearning afoot for the age of letter writing as a means of communication at depth.

Almost 20 years ago, G. Kingsley Ward had an unlikely bestseller with his Letters of a Businessman to His Son. Modelled, perhaps, on Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, it sparked any number of copycat collections of missives to young women, young Christians or “to the next generation from people who know a thing or two.”

They’re popular, perhaps, because letters suggest investment of time and thought and heart.