Letters and Emails

Rules of etiquette have changed over the years, there is less stress on how letters are written as people are writing more emails. I noticed that the way people open letters is no longer with the word dear as I used in the sixties and seventies. People greet others in letters with “hello”instead of “dear” or even ‘hey” which used to be something that was rude in the past.
 Classic letter writing involved the use of letterheads with the author’s name on the right and the person who you are writing to on the left. Today the letter form has the author’s name on the left on the same side as the person’s signature. But when it comes to informal mailings, sentences are clipped and there is much less concentration on the structure of letter as it used to be.What about beginning sentences with and and but which used to be only in the middle of sentences and acted as conjunctions by being there.
In short, rules to standard letter writing has changed thanks to the advent of email writing, just as memo taking must have modified letter forms before the computer age.People want to get to the point faster and even talk in note form as if the sentences already had the prepositions and articles it used to have to hold it together.It is up to the student to consult a language coach who can take him through the jungle of usages as well as explain the use of idiomatic expressions and their phrasal verbs  that are also of recent use.