Hello, my name is Lydia Beth, and welcome to Writing a Friendly Letter! In this video,
you will learn why we write friendly letters and how they are properly written.
Writing letters can be fun. Would you like to write a letter to a friend? I bet you do!
Let's learn how so you can get started. Let's go!
In the past, before cell phones, computers, laptops, and social media, people used to write
letters on paper. Did you know we still do? Many people enjoy writing letters by hand or typewriter
on paper as a way to send a more personal message. Learning how to correctly write a friendly
letter can help you communicate to friends and family. It can be a lot of fun to send letters!
So why do people write friendly letters? We write them to inform,
or give information on something; to persuade;
to ask questions; to make plans;
to answer someone; to thank someone, my favorite; or even to apologize.
All of these are informal reasons.
Informal reasons mean that they're for fun or for personal reasons.
There are five parts of a friendly letter. They can be thought of like a person's body.
The first part is the heading. You can think of that as Mia's head – it's at the top. The heading
contains the return address, or the address of the person writing the letter. Then, the greeting.
I'm drawing the line to Mia's mouth. When we greet someone out loud, we use our mouths. We say, "hey,
hi!" In a letter, the greeting stands by itself and is followed by a comma,
something like "Dear Peter," "Dear Sally."
The body is where the information of the letter is. It's in the middle, just like Mia's body. This
is made up of at least one paragraph. The closing and the signature go together at the bottom – we
would say our feet. The closing is a polite way to end the letter, and your signature is your name.
Let's take a look at this friendly letter written by Julio to his friend Remy. The parts of the
letter, remember, are the heading, the greeting, the body, the closing, and the signature.
Can you guess which one is the heading? Good job! The heading contains the return address
and the date.
The reason we put this here is so that whomever you are writing your letter to knows where to
send a reply or an answer back to you – it is your address if you are writing the
letter – and the date tells when the letter was written, in this case, February 6, 2020.
The greeting is the next part of the letter. It's sort of the "hello" of the letter.
The greeting usually uses the word "Dear" and the name and a comma. Capitalize the
D in "Dear," and the person's first name is capitalized. The next part is the body.
In this case, the body here has two paragraphs. Notice that the paragraphs are each indented,
just like you would when you're writing a regular paragraph.
The closing and the signature together end the letter.
The closing can be different. Julio here decided to use "Your best friend, comma." You could use
the word "Regards," "Sincerely," "Your friend" – there are many different choices. Remember,
the first letter of the closing gets capitalized in the first word but not the others. If you
look back at Julio's letter, you'll notice "best" and "friend" are not capitalized,
but there is a comma afterwards, and he signed his name in cursive.
Now I'd like to talk to you a little bit about how everything is lined up on the page.
On notebook paper, there's a margin here. It's this red line that runs up and down the paper.
Most of the letter is lined up on the margin, but the heading, if you notice, is over here,
and so is the closing and the signature. If I were to draw a line all the way down,
you'd notice they line up. That's a lot on one page! Let's take a look at a fresh sample.
Here is a letter from... can you guess? Very good! Peter.
Peter wrote this letter. He wrote it to his friend... good job! Sylvie. And if you notice, he
wrote on something called stationary. It doesn't have any lines or margins or holes to follow.
The normal parts of our friendly letter are there. We have...
what's this called? Good job! The heading. This is... right, the greeting. Capital D,
capital S in Sylvie and a comma. What are these two paragraphs called? And notice they're indented
here and here. Very good. These two paragraphs make up the body.
And over here, we have the word "sincerely" capitalized with a comma and Peter's signature.
Oh, I gave part of it away! Right, "Sincerely" is the closing, and "Peter" is the signature.
I want to point out a couple of things about indenting. If you notice, there are no margins
on this paper – because as I said, it's stationary – but the heading and the closing and signature
are indented the same amount of space to the right. You can draw an imaginary line
and see that they are. The greeting and most of the paragraph parts are lined up to the margin.
The first line of each paragraph are indented just like a normal paragraph. It's very important.
Now that you have a letter to send, how do you send it?
Well, there are three ways. One, just give it to them!
The second way is electronically.
This means email or chat, and definitely, you need parents' permission, and they need
to know to whom you're sending such a letter. And the third way is mail it.
You need a real postage stamp to do this. Here's an envelope. You put your letter folded neatly
inside and make sure it fits. Then, seal it. A lot of times, there's a lick and stick glue on
an envelope that you can run your tongue along. Be careful not to cut yourself on the paper!
If you're sending it in the post office here in the United States, you need to know how
to address an envelope for a friendly letter. The first thing you need to do is to put your address
on the envelope. Your address, well, yes, it's called the return address, and it goes right here.
It's so both the post office and who is receiving the letter knows who it's coming from. In this
case, Ashley Woods decided to write a letter to her friend Jude, so her address goes here
in the upper left-hand corner. You can see she has her name; her street address; number street; and
she lives in an apartment; the name of the city, Kapolei; Hawaii is the state; and the zip code.
This is the addressee, the person who will get the letter in the mail. She's writing to Jude
Phillips, 704 Practice Street – that's his address – in Herfert, Washington 97844, the ZIP code.
And the last thing she needed to put is the stamp. This is an official stamp. You have to
spend money on it and buy it from the post office or from a store that sells postage
stamps. Ask your parent. A regular sticker won't do, and you'll get your letter back.
Let's practice how to address an envelope. Where would the sender go? Well, that's you.
Very good! In the upper left-hand corner. What about the addressee?
This is also known as the recipient.
I'll give you a hint: It's your friend's address. Great job! It goes in the middle.
And last but not least... uh, you're way ahead of me. The stamp. Wow,
now you're ready to start writing your very own friendly letters! To whom will you write?
Make your letters interesting and full of details, and remember to always be clever!