Question

More and more people use the mobile phone to communicate, and no longer write letters to each other. Some people think that the skill of letter-writing will soon disappear completely. Do you agree or disagree? How important do you think letter-writing is? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from our own knowledge or experience.

Sample answer

Will the mobile phone replace the traditional letter-writing completely? When was the last time you received a long letter full of rambling details? To the first question, the answer is probably "yes"; to the second, the response is usually "don't remember".

Using the cell-phone to communicate has many advantages, and none of these is as obvious as time-saving. It was then when sending or receiving letters was the traditional way for people to keep in touch with each other, which often had to take days, even weeks. And it is now when all you have to do is hold a hand phone, touch it, click a button if any, and the message zips off to the recipient—usually in a matter of seconds. In addition, the mobile phone has become so technologically convenient and efficient that you can take calls or check your correspondence and reply instantly from anywhere, entirely independent of mailing services provided by the post office. No wonder, most of the users who are awash in the information technology spend their days walking around with their noses buried in such smart-phones as a Blackberry, iPhone, HTC, you name it. Under these circumstances, who should fail to imagine that the skill of letter-writing that used to be would be no longer?

These days, cases of communication other than using the mobile phone are few and far between. However, in spite of being down in popularity and out of fashion, letter-writing is not dead, not yet. Perhaps, there are a few people among the older generation who still prefer words on paper rather than on the screen. Without a doubt, the skill of letter-writing as an art is losing ground, even though plenty of people may pretend to believe that the importance of traditional way of writing cannot be over-emphasized. So it should come as no surprise that hand-written letters, the like of which are now rarely seen, were saved and treasured as family keepsakes and histories. In light of unprecedented use of technology, it should not be long before the arrival of the year that might be dubbed as the year people would stop writing traditional letters.

After all, you had better ask no more questions about the future of traditional letter-writing because the smart-phone with high-tech computer features will be the future for communication. At this stage, some worried experts say that it is time to take a step back and reassess the value of letter-writing. Sadly, however, chances are that there is no turning back.

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