The Art of Writing – Epistolary Genre Forgotten or Metamorphosed The paper deals with the models of classical and present-day epistolary genre and discusses the problems that have arisen with the introduction of mobile phones and digital techniques. Fax, e-mail and SMS have completely replaced traditional epistolary genre – letter, Spacio-temporal constraints have conditioned the following linguistic peculiarities of SMS texts: simple syntax, abbreviations, implicit phrases that presuppose high degree of shared knowledge between the communicants, disdain of punctuation and orthography rules, imitation of spontaneous spoken discourse.