Get Your Letters Through Faster

It recently took a letter almost a week to reach me in Roanoke from Columbus, Ohio — a distance that’s driveable in about seven hours. My address was handwritten in script (or “cursive,” if you prefer), which explains it.

So this got me thinking to an old seminar I had on how to speed up your mail delivery. It’s pretty simple.

Most addresses are read by the Postal Service’s rather sophisticated character-recognition system. The ones the system can’t read are done by hand, which slows them down. So the trick is to make your address as machine readable as possible.

Definitely avoid script or cursive. That almost certainly has to be human-read. Clear, block letters are best.

But here’s a better trick: Make sure to keep the city, state, and ZIP code on the same line, in all caps, without any punctuation.

Bad:
Roanoke, Va.
24015

Better:
Roanoke, VA 24015

Best:
ROANOKE VA 24015

And this applies whether you’re doing it by hand or using a computer. (If you’re using a PC, you can often add the Delivery Point Bar Code to an address automatically, which speeds it up even further.)

I’m sure there are other tricks, but I wanted to share at least the all-caps-no-punctuation one. (In fact, let me know if you have any others.)