thumb|[[J'Accuse…! is an influential open letter written by Émile Zola in 1898 over the Dreyfus Affair.]]
thumb|[[Bill Gates's Open Letter to Hobbyists from the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, January 1976]]
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally.
Open letters usually take the form of a letter addressed to an individual but are provided to the public through newspapers and other media, such as a letter to the editor or blog.
Context
In previous centuries, letter writing was a significant form of communication. Letters were normally kept private between the sender and recipient. Consequently, an open letter, usually published in a newspaper or magazine, was a then-rare opportunity for the general public to see what a public figure was saying to another public figure. Open letters, published in newspapers, became more common in the late 19th century.
Motivations for writing
There are a number of reasons why an individual would choose the form of an open letter, including the following reasons:
- To publicly criticize something
- To make a power play in shaping public opinion on an issue or framing a dispute
- To state the author's opinion
- For humor value
- To make public a communication that must take place as a letter for reasons of formality
Problems
Eric Kaufmann characterizes the authoring of open letters in academia calling for the dismissal of academics as a form of "hard authoritarianism" accompanying political correctness and cancel culture. Others associate open letters with bullying, divisiveness, safetyism (suppressing ideas to ensure a reader's immediate emotional comfort), and a culture of complaining.
Open letters tend not to win hearts and minds, especially if there is a limited connection between the writers, the subject, and the nominal addressee. A close connection, such as university faculty writing to the university president about their hopes and goals for university students, is more likely to be effective at influencing a decision than an absent or distant connection, such as students writing to the internet at large about the students' beliefs about a political situation in a country that most of the students have never visited.