How To Teach Letter Writing To Students

Students, express themselves in different ways for different reasons. Letter writing provides one of such ways, therefore it's important to know how to write a letter and teach it to students in a way and manner that will help them to develop a positive attitude in writing.

What is Letter Writing ?

Letter writing is a way of communicating ideas from one person to another, it's like talking to someone, or a conversation. Every letter whether business or private must obey certain conventions.

All letters must be well written so that the recipients will derive joy from reading them. Therefore, it's important for the teacher to teach the learners how to write to someone as he would talk with that person, though some may consider writing letters a difficult task, maybe due to the fact that they are not too sure of the form the letter should take or it could be that they don't know what to talk about even technology too, the android, iPhone and other gadgets that enables typing may kill their interest in letter writing.

Students who have this mindset should be guided be guided to follow certain roles in writing letters. In addition, if they are drilled properly under guided writing, they will not be frustrated in writing letters.

Types of Letters

There are two major types of letters, the informal and the formal. All letters that are based on personal communications are formal like a daddy to son kind of letters or a friend to friend this are the samples of formal letter. Private or personal (informal) Letters addressed to persons like Senior Officers, firms, institutions, government establishment etc are called formal letters.

Why do we write letters

Why the need for letter writing in this tech world? Since I have my computers, smartphones and tablet to send messages I don't really see the need for writing letters. If the above words are what you're thinking then you should know something; the importance of letter writing cannot be understimated, even your laptop computer and other gadgets all requires skills of letter writing in other to write well with them. Again understandably

Importance of Letter Writing

It's important at the beginning of your lesson to discuss why we often write letters. You can start by throwing this question to the students in your class and you'll be suprised at some of the responses you'll get.

We write letters for the purpose of communicating our ideas to someone who is not present at the time of writing. We writer letters for a specific purpose, we may write to ask favour, or to thank someone for doing us a favour, or give information about certain issues which are of great importance to the recipient.

In everyday conversation we see whoever we want to converse with and we are opportuned to know whether or not our ideas or points have been clearly understood by the person we are conversing with. But conversation in letter does not have the same chance as the face-to-face form of conversation because in letter-writing we cannot see the person we are writing to. This is why it's important for teachers to explain that whatever students write must be well planned and stated so that the recipient will be able understand what the student is talking about.