How to Write Telegrams Properly (1928) | Hacker News Reader

How to Write Telegrams Properly (1928)

telegraph-office.com

56 pointsradarsat119 comments

"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 ...

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.

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?

"When groups of figures are spelled out, the chance of an error in transmission is reduced to a minimum."

I guess its easier for the receiving operator to detect the error in "One Thosand" compared to "100" when coming over in serial (Original message being "One Thousand" and "1000" respectively).

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

https://archive.org/stream/adamscablecodex00cogoog#page/n22/...

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.

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.

Long distance phone cable bandwidth and switching capacity were very very limited.

Telegrams are in writing in a way phones aren't, so they were necessary for e.g. legal notices at least up until the invention of the fax. In India they're still widely used for this reason. Ironically (given the article) people also see them as more formal than a phone call, so in some countries they're traditional for e.g. wedding congratulations.

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.

Many households did not have phones until well into the second half of the 20th century.

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).

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.

Ho, been there, done that: https://biz.twitter.com/en-gb/write-good-tweets, although that one does not focus on restricting word/character count.

>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.

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.

(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.

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.

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

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.

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