About Dear World

Dear Reader: What do you want to tell the world? We began these lessons with writing a private letter to yourself. In this final lesson, you’ll address your letter to someone else, speaking personally about a topic that matters to you.

For example, in the excerpts below from a 1962 open letter, James Baldwin addresses his nephew James.

Dear James:

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don’t know if you have known anybody from that far back…first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort…

…It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers, built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle,

James^[1]

Open Letters as Opinion Writing

Letters written to make a public point, including a personal salutation (“Dear James”) and closing (“Your uncle”), may well be addressed to a real person. But they aren’t meant as private correspondence. Open letters are a form of opinion writing, and they often combine personal details with larger arguments.

Open letters combine personal details with larger arguments.

You’ll find many examples of open letters in publications. They can be vehicles for expressing outrage at a news event or reflecting on the way discrimination hurts individuals and communities. Take Michael Luo’s “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China,” which appeared on the print front page of the New York Times in 2016.^[2] Luo confronts the unnamed woman, but also conveys his sadness and shock at being insulted. He nods to the emotional impact in straightforward prose directed at a news audience.

Challenging the conventional wisdom in public exposes a writer, but the open-letter format can humanize a debate, too. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his discussion about race in America to his teenage son.^[3] Baldwin directed his thoughts about the racism experienced by African Americans to his nephew. His letter was also meant to appeal to a particular audience – readers of the Progressive magazine, where it was originally published.

Audience and Tone

Open letters aren’t always serious or relegated to a newspaper opinion section. In learning how to speak publicly in a personal voice, consider your private correspondence. Your relationship with the person addressed determines the tone and content. Are you writing warmly to a close friend? Are you sending a formal note to your boss? Are you emailing a complaint about a defective product?

You can be chatty, funny, furious, concerned, or full of advice. When writing to a friend or family member, you may not be conscious of your tone. On the other hand, if you’re dealing with a difficult topic, you may be well aware of how carefully you need to pick your words.

You can be chatty, funny, furious, concerned, or full of advice.

Open letters also involve communicating with other people, but the stakes are different when you do it in public. Keeping your audience in mind beyond the person addressed is key. The mental tool of self-awareness will carry you a long way here. If you’re writing for a general audience, it’s likely not everyone will agree. That’s fine, as long as you’re aware of why you’re speaking out.

In the “Dear World “activities that follow, you’ll consider both your tone and audience in publicly expressing what you think.

Q. How does this lesson build on the previous lesson?

The previous lesson emphasizes self-examination of changes in your life in order to craft a story. In “Dear World,” you’ll connect personal storytelling with opinion writing, focusing on how to present your perspective in an engaging way.

Q. How serious does my open letter need to be?

That’s up to you, but opinion writing starts with what you like and don’t like. You can be angry about climate change or really hate cat memes. The “Dream First” activity here prompts you to come up with lists of things you love and hate.

“Martha, I don’t want to sound like another ranting jerk!”

You may be thinking, “But Martha, I don’t want to sound like another ranting jerk!” I don’t want you to, either. I understand the fear, because social media is awash with diatribes, many about ridiculously trivial things.

However, these lessons are meant to move you beyond knee-jerk responses to the world. Besides, a funny open letter about a pet peeve can be engaging. Here’s a satirical example from McSweeney’s – “An Open Letter to the Lady Selling Seashells by the Seashore” – intended for a hip literary audience:

“Dear Lady Selling Seashells by the Seashore,

Let me get this straight. You managed to create the most successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign of all time but forgot to include a call-to-action? You’ve got half the world talking about your seashell business (trying to at least, your tagline is a real sonofabitch) and somehow failed to mention where your retail stores are located?” ^[4]

Although I know many writers worry about going too far when they get fired up, I often observe the opposite: they don’t go far enough. Their writing sounds too abstract, lacks specifics, or doesn’t include personal stories (or jokes) that hook readers. As the “Seashells” letter indicates, a fun rant requires enough distance on the writer’s part to describe what’s being skewered and why.

Start by ranting in private.

So, start by ranting in private, generating what irritates, alarms, amuses, or worries you in your Process Notebook. Then, as the lesson activities proceed, you can figure out how serious to be.