Yours faithfully – why letters preserve precious moments

Personally, I'm struggling to think of when I last did, apart from the occasional, hastily-scribbled note shoved inside a card at Christmas.

We all enjoy receiving that unexpected letter from an old friend, but it seems fewer of us find the time to sit down and write one ourselves. And while there has been a sharp decline in the art of letter writing over the past decade, the number of people who communicate electronically has soared.

Yet we keep handwritten letters, the important ones at least. I still have those written by friends and former girlfriends, as well as a moving letter written 16 years ago by my father informing me that my grandfather had died suddenly. He wrote to me because as a student I didn't have a landline and this was before the arrival of emails and the ubiquitous mobile phone. But I'm glad he did because you can't re-read a phone call.

However, it seems that many of us have lost the knack of writing letters. According to Royal Mail research, nine out of 10 people say they love receiving handwritten letters in the post, but most feel too overawed by the process of sending one to even bother starting.

Which is why comedian, TV presenter and serial tweeter Sue Perkins hosted a letter-writing workshop yesterday morning for followers of her Twitter link, encouraging people to personalise their letters and cards by helping them compose limericks or jokes.

Perkins, who is fronting a campaign to get people back into the habit of writing to one another, says she hopes to show people that writing a letter doesn't have to be a chore. "Basically it's just to encourage people to be creative, to not worry too much about not having copperplate handwriting and scented notepaper. That culture of letter-writing can be quite oppressive."

Young people, in particular, are less inclined to write letters these days. In a study of 1,188 UK schoolchildren earlier this year, one in four of the seven to 14 year-olds questioned said they had not tried writing a letter in the past 12 months, while over half had written an email or a message on a social networking site.

But is there really any difference between writing a handwritten letter and composing an email? Child education expert Sue Palmer believes there is. "There is a personal quality to a letter written in your own hand and a level of emotional investment that is lacking in electronic communication," she says.

"All the evidence and research into our well being shows that one of the most important factors influencing our mental health is our relationships and yet the way we communicate is becoming increasingly impersonal."

She says modern consumerism and our hectic daily lifestyles have made it harder to find the time to sit down and write a letter.

"We're so busy trying to keep up with electronic information it becomes easier to send an email or buy a card and I think it is a dying art as technology continues moving forward.

"We already have voice-activated systems and touch screen software and I suspect that letter writing will just become something you learn at school and use less and less as you grow up."

But why does a handwritten love letter, or a "Dear John" note, have more resonance than an email? "It shows you have taken the time and trouble to think about someone and it gives great pleasure to the person who receives it, whereas an email ticks a box and can never have the same emotional impact," says Emma Soames, editor-at-large of Saga.

She says that only about one in 20 letters she receives is handwritten. But despite its dwindling popularity she believes the art of letter writing remains important. "Writing an email is not as thoughtful as a letter and if you want to leave something for posterity then pen and ink is the only way to go. It's lovely to have a box full of letters to look back at, although I think historians in the future will have a horrendous time trying to piece together the chatter that makes up the warp and weft of our lives," she says.

"Some of our greatest literary works have been letters – would Napoleon's to Josephine have been so poignant had they been emails, would they have survived at all?"

Perhaps at some point in the future when technology has finally outpaced us we will realise, as Walt Whitman once said, that "the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."