‘Tis the season for thank-you notes, the time of year when gifts abound and acknowledgments must follow.

While some people avert this issue by conveying their gratitude via phone, others face a thoroughly modern dilemma: Whether to handwrite or email their thanks.

Several schools of thought exist on this matter. Traditionalists argue that a hand-chosen gift warrants a handwritten note ”“ period. Implicit is a kind of quid pro quo, and a sense of insult if the code is broken.

Realists, by contrast, may also prefer handwritten notes but, sadly, have given up expecting, or writing, them.  

Then there are the modernists, who don’t see what all the fuss is about. A thank-you note is a thank-you note, however it gets there.

Over distance and time, most of us can agree that the point of these notes has remained unchanged: To acknowledge the thoughtfulness of someone’s gesture. For gifts that arrive by mail, a “thank you” also confirms that the gift actually arrived.

In the digital age, however, finding a suitable middle ground isn’t so simple.

The fact is, most of our online life conveys an air of speed and impulse, not of care and thought. Emails are typically dashed-off, as if they’re postscripts. The medium doesn’t encourage composition or revision, the slow processes of hammering ideas into words. So, even when an email is carefully written, it comes with a certain taint. No amount of deliberation or artful editing can override that guilt by association.

So there it is. You can spend the same amount of time tapping out an electronic thank-you ”“ shaping, refining, re-working the prose ”“ as you would a handwritten letter. Click “send,” and it arrives instantly, without fanfare, alongside assorted coupons, renewal notices, and other spam.

By contrast, had you handwritten the same note, and pasted a postage stamp on the envelope, it would probably be welcomed as an oasis in a sea of bills. Which, by the way, is one of the more elemental reasons we should care about the survival of snail mail. Without it, we’d never know what anyone’s handwriting looked like anymore.

Still, there’s a strategy for those who want their digital words to earn the same cred as those on paper. Amid the plethora of error-laden, unpunctuated, lowercase emails that fill most of our in-boxes, well-crafted exceptions will always stand out.

Like a shirt that’s neatly pressed, even a thank-you note benefits from a little grooming.

 — Joan Silverman’s work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News. She lives in Kennebunk.