So here is a question for you. Is there a correlation between the complexity of writing and the frequency of communication? I would think that there is in some form. If I was only able to communicate with someone (say my mom for instance) once every 3 months I'm pretty sure that my hand-written letter on expensive paper with expensive ink that is going to take weeks to reach home would be far more complex and nuanced than the text message conversation we had last week about my sister's dog.
This is a good example of my point about the medium of communications having a strong
influence on the content of the communications and, by extension, the thought processes of author and audience.
When a medium naturally lends itself to thoughtful and careful responses, demands that you maximize the quality of your ideas and the power of your writing, and gives author and audience time to think things through...
Guess what, you end up with a more thriving literary and intellectual culture.
When everything is short and punctuated... guess what, everything kind of boils down to playground insults.
People dedicate entire careers and write long books about complex topics, oftentimes only reaching the most threadbare conclusions because of so many complexities, that Twitter limits to 280 characters.
Also, we've got all these fancy preserved letters. Where are the poor ones? Not every one of those letters was written by a literary genius. There's bound to be a fair number that were written by a farm boy who was chicken scratching his way through a letter home.
Major Ballou was certainly exceptional in his final letter. He never comes out and says it with certainty, but you can tell it was a man writing his goodbye to his wife and children before his death in battle.
But, if you read Civil War correspondence, he is a standout but not a outlier.
I do not want to make this political, but reading the remarks of men like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and comparing their words to modern presidents... ones since TV came along... is almost painful.