
How to Write Telegrams Properly (1928) - radarsat1
http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/telegram.html
======
pbhjpbhj
"Fortunes might be saved by discounting the manufacture of musical instruments
and by closing the art galleries, but no one thinks of suggesting such a
procedure."

My city's public art gallery (UK) has stopped putting on exhibitions, the
council plan to close the last of the libraries and the gallery with it ...

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FiatLuxDave
For anyone who doesn't know, telegrams are still around. Email is a lot
cheaper and does basically the same thing, but if you want to spend $30 on
having an email hand-delivered, you can.

I sent one back in 1997ish, basically to impress a girl who liked quirky
things. Of course, it had to be written in the correct style. It seemed to
work - we dated for 3 years after that.

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ams6110
It was interesting to learn that charges were per word and not per character.
And that "2nd" counts as two words while "second" is one, dispite being twice
the number of characters.

Weren't all telegrams sent by morse code on the wire? Or was there another
protocol?

~~~
yrro
There were entire dictionaries compiled so that words in a telegram could be
kept to a minimum.

[https://archive.org/stream/adamscablecodex00cogoog#page/n22/...](https://archive.org/stream/adamscablecodex00cogoog#page/n22/mode/2up)

A couple of extracts from the preface:

    
    
      The value of this code will be seen at a glance. We will suppose 
      that the friend abroad is in Paris and is about to leave for London and 
      wishes to apprise his friend at home of that fact. He turns to the Index 
      and finds sentences beginning with "Am going to," "Am leaving for," 
      etc., are to be found on pages 80 to 82, and then makes up the following 
      message:— "INGRATE, LONDON, TUESDAY," which, when trans- 
      lated by the receiver, means, "Am going to London and expect to reach 
      there Tuesday morning. Telegrams sent to me there shall reach me 
      promptly." In this message twenty words are sent at the cost of but 
      three.
    

And,

    
    
      Furthermore, in sending and receiving messages, do not fail to take 
      time to read the telegram carefully, and re-check it to and from the code. 
      Too much care cannot he taken in the translation of cable messages, as an 
      error may cost both the sender and the receiver a deal of trouble, worry,
      and expense.

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rdl
I'm interested in the coexistence of telegram and telephone; it sounds like
they used telephones for local delivery or acceptance of telegram for a while.
Was long distance calling unsuited for cost reasons, or unavailable, or
otherwise not desired?

Sort of similar to SMS vs. voice, SMS vs. email (esp on mobile mua), email vs.
IM.

~~~
jpatokal
Long-distance phone calls used to be extraordinarily expensive. As late as
1950, a 5-minute phone call from New York to LA cost $3.70, or around $35 in
today's money.

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dajbelshaw
As a new literacies researcher, this fascinates me - especially the 'forced
informality' through artificial constraints.

"so accustomed is the public to telegraphic brevity, that their use often
produces amusement rather than the expression of formality which the sender
desired."

In this case the brevity was due to cost, but in this age of abundance we
_choose_ such constraints (and complain when they're removed - c.f. Twitter).

------
jschulenklopper
Although telegrams are not restricted to 140 characters, this guide translates
well to writing tweets. It will not take long before an article "How to Write
Tweets Properly" (2016) (twitter.com)" is posted to HN.

~~~
logicallee
>this guide translates well to writing tweets

I thought it would, so I read this guide (for the first time) after doing
find-replace in the source code of Telegram, Telegraph, telegram, and
telegraph with Tweet, Tweet, tweet, and tweet respectively. The guide does NOT
translate well to writing tweets! At all. It's fine grammatically, but the
whole guide becomes nonsense. The specific advice on writing, e.g. "20th" as
"twentieth" (because the former was counted as two words and the latter as
one) does not translate at all. What it says about billing is nonsense. What
it says about delivery is nonsense. What it says about customs and how tweets
are used is nonsense. The whole guide becomes nonsense.

you would think it would still have excellent parts - but not really.

~~~
logicallee
Apparently two downvoters disagreed with me, so can you point out any
sentences at all that you find useful or relevant?

I didn't read it all the way through but guide seemed completely irrelevant to
tweeting. Obviously reducing tweet length is important for everyone, and a
hard skill to master: this guide doesn't include anything that can be used.

In particular the abbreviations don't seem current. Then there are whole
sections of advice like this:

>' for feet

>"for inches

>% for percent

>@ for at

>should be written "feet," "inches," "percent," "at," etc.

Which is obviously literally the opposite advice of that which you would use
for tweeting.

Or look at:

>For example, a press correspondent might ,first write this dispatch:

>"The enemy has not yet been met or even seen on account of the entanglements
thrown up during the night," etc.

>Revised for the cable, this dispatch might read:

>"Enemy unmet unseen account entanglements upthrown night."

They say "upthrown" instead of "thrown up" because upthrown is 1 word but
"thrown up" is 2. The words they omit are ones that editors might put back in.
But it's not something you can tweet! (Account instead of "on account of".) If
you tweeted "Enemy unmet unseen account entanglements upthrown night"
absolutely nobody would understand what you mean.

The whole guide does not really translate in any way to tweeting. I think
perhaps my downvoters thought that I was being too literal, that I shouldn't
expect it to -- but why not? Brevity is the underlying style focus in each, so
you would think that a lot of the guide would translate! It simply doesn't.

Being extremely brief and using specific techniques to be briefer is an
important skill used in both telegrams and tweeting, and the advice I read
here doesn't in any way translate into tweeting. You can't use any of it.

~~~
jschulenklopper
(Upvoted your reply because it is relevant and adds to the discussion;
thanks.)

Obviously, a lot of the advise is targeted to the telegraph domain, for
example in reducing words (instead of characters), not using punctuation marks
(because they are words), and how addresses should be written (and we have
mentions). So, in a very literal sense of this "HOWTO", I agree that it does
not translate well to tweeting.

On second reading, I guess I was (and still am) impressed by the relevance of
the table of contents (section headers) for tweeting, and that it _could_ be
used in a guide on "how to write tweets". So, the actual advice does perhaps
not translate well, but the structure is relevant. Perhaps I got carried away
by reading the TOC.

------
ggchappell
Lots of interesting things here.

One of them:

> If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, ... the sender has been
> guilty of economic waste. ... He added to the volume of traffic ....

And yet:

> But when you think of telegraphing someone to "reply at once," you may very
> well save the cost of an unnecessary word and write it, "reply immediately,"
> ....

So, in order to reduce traffic volume, we are counseled to replace 6 letters
and a very brief pause with 11 letters.

I think the writer had trouble distinguishing between trying not to overburden
the telegraph system vs. hacking its cost structure.

Also, here is the first sentence I quoted above, in full (emphasis is mine):

> If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, _words which might be
> omitted without impairing the sense of the message,_ the sender has been
> guilty of economic waste.

The phrase that I have italicized is completely unnecessary. Of course, the
writer was not composing a telegram. Still, I think this is just a bit ironic.

------
unsignedint
Commercial telegram's thing of the past, but if you want to experiment with
it, there's the National Traffic System if you are in the US, other country
may have similar system in place, ran by radio amateurs. You can pretty much
send non-commercial message to anyone (as long as third-party message is legal
in the country for domestic message, and originating/destination country have
third-party agreements.)

Although, it can be bit challenging to get hold of someone who can actually
place a message to the system. (If you have a license, you can actually
originate message yourself through your local NTS net.)

[0]: [http://www.arrl.org/nts](http://www.arrl.org/nts)

------
camperman
Hemingway was taught how to write telegrams properly during his time at the
Kansas City Star calling proper ones "without fat, nothing but blood and bones
and muscle. It's a new language." It's almost certain this training as a
teenager greatly influenced his prose style later.

