Oh gawd. The people who seethe at singaporeforum and the like who circulate rejected Straits Times forum letters must be having palpitations at the recent travesty of a letter that made it past the editorial desk. But to his credit, I really don’t think the forum letters that make it to American newspapers are any better than this one.

In the same light, here’s a letter entitled “Forum-letter writing too risky for S’poreans”.

I refer to the forum letter about skydiving that appeared not too long ago in The Straits Times.

I believe that writing forum letters is too dangerous a civic activity to be made available to the people.

Even the safety of professionals cannot be guaranteed, let alone the people new to the art.

Iris Chang, who wrote “The Rape of Nanking”, was a best-selling author. Yet she died in a freak suicide incident1 last year.

Even an author, who has written books and surely several letters in her time, could not free herself from emotional stress after doing too much research for her writings. What chance of survival would a student have facing the unknown? Iris Chang is not the only case.

Several people have lost their lives in writing letters.

Letter writing’s an intricate process. When one malfunction in the command of English occurs, it causes a chain reaction that effectively seals a person’s fate.

A contraction may help to reduce the risk of overflowing letters but if it was really that effective, why are so many people still not using apostrophes in formal letter-writing?

Also, if we factor in the reactions of the people we write about, we would have a lot of problems to contend with.

Steering the topic away from defamatory material is not as simple as it looks. It’s even harder when unpredictable subjects take offense from all directions. These defamation lawsuits can occur instantaneously without any warning.

After overcoming these two problems, we still have one more to take care of - spelling. Just one slight mistake could turn you into a fallen letter writer.

Recently, a letter writer I know got a paper cut while tearing up his draft as a result of sheer stupidity. The author was a famous writer.

I hope you can see why I do not think letter writing is a safe activity.

Ee Lai Er

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