Email, texting, and social media have essentially rendered the practice of writing letters by hand obsolete.
Despite their being old school, a person might still write one when they want to add a personal touch that doesn't carry over digitally -- say, a child writing to his pen pal, a foreign exchange student reaching out to family from the other side of the world, or a hopeless romantic who wishes to spill his guts via pen and paper.
Can you guess how many letters Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, wrote in his lifetime?
Mind you, there was no Yahoo, Facebook, or Twitter in the 1700s and 1800s. Even the telephone wasn't invented until 1876, and Jefferson died in 1826.
That means people in Jefferson's time had to make do with communicating through correspondence.
And, evidently, Jefferson was nothing short of a pro.
He wrote -- get this -- roughly 19,000 letters in his life!
I'm sure many of us can't say we've written 19 letters in our lives.
If that staggering number doesn't make Jefferson a prodigious writer, I don't know what does.
It makes you think about and appreciate how easy we have it in the modern digital age. Keep in mind that correspondence could take weeks if not months to reach its intended recipient in Jefferson's day. Now, we can communicate with someone thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds.
I can only imagine how much of Jefferson's day was spent scribbling away in his study, writing to everyone from George Washington and John Adams to his friends and relatives.
While the practice may seem archaic today, it's important to remember that these people had no choice if they wished to stay in touch with people who lived far away.
What do you think of Jefferson's remarkable output? When was the last time you composed a letter by hand?
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