I love a good P.S. That is, I USED to love a good P.S. but they seem to have become obsolete since email became the favoured form of correspondence. In my younger years, I had many pen-pals and I LOVED writing them letters with pretty paper and glittery pens and funky stickers, almost as much as I loved receiving letters from them. I used to have about 4 or 5 pen-pals all at once, but only a few went the distance. They were all people I had met through primary school or through friends and kept in touch with them by putting pen to paper. I had one in Japan, a couple in the US, one in Gladstone, one in Cairns, and one in PNG.

The girl from Papua New Guinea I met in year 4 and we were pen pals up until I was about 22. We lost contact after that, but on a visit to Australia earlier this year, she popped in to see if my parents were still living at the same address, which they were, and asked after me. Unfortunately I was already living in Melbourne and Dad didn’t think to get her number or email address (that’s okay Dad. That’s a “Mum” thing to do!) so I never did get to catch up with her. I still have all of her letters though, and unlike my crazy scrawl, I always marvelled at her perfectly neat writing that didn’t change from start to finish, nor from 9-year-old to 22-year-old.

I used to experiment with different writing styles too – at one stage I was dotting all my “i”s with circles, or giving “g”s and “y”s straight tails. I went through a big loopy letter-writing phase, but mostly you could tell it was my writing because I started off with neat and normal-sized words and finished with a big, uneven mess!

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about! While writing my letters to various pen pals all around Australia and all around the world, usually 3 or 4 pages long, I would start thinking about what to write in my P.S. Not that I HAD to include a P.S. but I always did love to.

A typical ending to a letter may have looked like this: (pretend it’s almost legible:)

P.S. I miss you! I really wish we could just hang out!
P.P.S. Say hi to your family for me!
P.P.P.S. My family says hi too!

After the 3 Ps it would just get silly. But don’t think for a second I didn’t get silly!! Ha ha.

I guess the main reason for writing a P.S. is that you want to include something that you had left out of the letter, and it would be too messy to try and write it in the body, so you add it at the end, hence the name Post Script. Now, call me crazy, but if you’re typing a business email, and you’d forgotten to put something in the email, wouldn’t you just go back and add it? Is there an etiquette for this? Am I missing something?

I think in personal emails, it’s nice to put a P.S. I miss you or P.S. I love you, but not such a great idea, in a business email, to put something like P.S. Please reply to this email to acknowledge receipt of information. Shouldn’t that be in the body?

I just think it’s weird.

P.S. I miss you!