79. Old gold: Sal has a jaffa salad
When keyboarding skills are second nature.
Dear Reader,
I’ve unearthed some more buried treasure for today’s post.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and in drafting my last couple of Saturday posts I noticed that I’d been turning to the computer more readily than to my notebook and pen in an effort to get words out of my head and into written text more swiftly.
Typing at the speed of light, although convenient, has its drawbacks. When my fingers are on autopilot, well, my brain sometimes skips some steps. Have I been giving as much thought to what I’ve been writing when I haven’t been writing it by hand?
Well, I wondered.
This latest ‘Old gold’ post, then, is a story about learning to type, to drive, and to find my way around a busy city as a navigationally-challenged teenager out for the first time alone. I first published this post in July last year, when it was sent out to just fifteen subscribers.
There are many more of you now (thank you so much!), but even if you have seen this post before, I hope you’ll still enjoy the read.
Sal has a jaffa salad: when keyboarding skills are second nature
When my husband and I were tackling the pub quiz part of the puzzles section in the Saturday paper last week, this was the first question:
‘Sal has a jaffa salad!’ I blurted out.
‘WHAT?’
‘You can type that sentence just using letters in the middle row! Sal has a jaffa salad! That’s the middle row, not the top, so the answer’s A!’
I had impressed him by not having to look at a keyboard to know the answer. In fact my QWERTY-trained fingers – and my brain, too – know where the letters are without a second thought. I have a black belt in this stuff.
After finishing my A levels and before heading off to Germany as a gap-year au pair I spent several months learning two skills which were felt to stand me in good stead for my future: driving and touch typing. We lived in the middle of nowhere with a limited bus service, so driving was a necessity if I were ever to get anywhere without a lift from my parents, and the decision about typing was made for two reasons: because it would make essay writing at university easier, and ‘you’ll never be out of a job, Rebecca’.
That summer I would travel on three different buses three days a week to get to my business college course on the south coast on which I’d learn to type on huge early 1990s electric typewriters. It felt like such a big thing – I was 17 and shockingly young for my age, and I found the bus – and the bustle of peak-season Brighton – a real challenge. I’d get on the early bus from my village into town in time to catch the Brighton service. That would terminate in busy Churchill Square, where I’d then wait for the next 50p-a-journey ‘Centre Bus’ to turn up and take me along the seafront to Hove. Eventually I’d be deposited in a street near the business college.
And there, for half a day three days a week, I would bang out sequences of keys on the typewriter keyboard. Day one featured the home keys F and J along with the additional six keys my other three fingers could touch without stretching, and for that whole first morning I bashed:
ASDF JKL; ASDJ JKL; ASDF JKL;
muttering the letter names out loud as I did so. I would vocalise the semi-colon as ‘blah’ for the sake of tidy syllable scanning.
As my digits became more adept and the nerve pathways from my brain to my fingertips began to make more efficient connections, I progressed to the two remaining letters on the middle row. Stretching my left index finger further over to the right would catch the ‘G’, and a mirror of this movement enabled my right index finger to reach the ‘H’:
ASDFGHJKL; ASDFGHJKL; ASDFGHJKL;
The weeks continued and I was pleased to be finding it progressively easier to navigate the keyboard. Mistakes were no problem: I would just repeat the relevant line of the exercise until I’d got things right.
I enjoyed the course and took real pleasure in developing my skills. After a while the course workbook taught me how to properly deal with errors by using correction paper: tiny oblongs branded ‘Tipp-Ex’ which I would hold over the incorrectly-typed letter on my page. I’d hit backspace, strike the mistyped letter again to cover it with papery white-out in the same shape, then hit backspace again. Finally, I’d strike the correct letter key, which would fill the gap I’d whited out. Done properly, on white paper at least, the correction would be invisible. It was magic!
Building other secretarial skills happened along the way. I learned how to set out a business letter, how to format paragraphs (in ‘trad’ or ‘block’ style), and how to appropriately deal with ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’.1
One tired Monday morning I typed up a sample draft memo in the workbook which was all about ‘bus. calls’ and how they, whatever they might be, mustn’t be made before 1pm. I thought this was something to do with hailing public transport, but no, my exasperated tutor explained, ‘bus.’ in fact stood for ‘business’, which I was expected to type in full, and didn’t I know that British Telecom’s standard phone rate kicked in as soon as the more expensive peak hours ended at 1pm?
Embarrassed, I typed the whole page again, substituting ‘business’ for the errant ‘bus.’ Somehow I’d missed the instruction on how to handle the abbreviations I would encounter in the draft I was supposed to be bashing into shape.
Abbreviations were one thing. But the buses themselves were also a problem. I hated the bus. Buses aren’t at all like the London Tube: the Tube is an absolute gift for anyone requiring geographical reassurance because you can always be unequivocally certain which station stop you are pulling into. But bus stops NEVER give up their secrets to the likes of me. So for my first two weeks at the college I was late to almost every session I was timetabled for, turning up harried and breathless and panicked.
But I persevered.
Would all this training stand me in good stead for my future? I was enjoying myself: I was getting there with the typing, and my driving lessons had gone well – I passed my test first time. This was such a relief because it meant that I now could get myself to and from the business college under my own steam in the bright yellow 1970s Mini my parents had bought for their kids’ driving practice. I still had little clue how to find my way around, but I learned I couldn’t go too far wrong just by keeping the sea on my left and making sure I turned into one of the perpendicular streets on the right-hand side before I reached the leisure centre. After that, anyone I asked – and I had to ask every single day I went – would kindly direct me to George Street.
At university the next year, once I’d got back from my stint as an au pair, it was brilliant to be able to type up my essay drafts so easily. By then I had my own electric typewriter cum word processor, complete with correction ribbon – yes, my machine had a ‘delete’ key! I’d finish each handwritten draft, review and correct it, and then sit at my typewriter to copytype it, looking neither at my fingers nor the keys. I was so grateful to have learned the skill. Even if my 5,000 word essays were complete flannel – and trust me, they were – they would at least be beautifully formatted in glorious monospaced pica.
And the ‘you’ll never be out of a job, Rebecca’? I was grateful to have been employed as a bilingual secretary for a German firm in the late 1990s, and had many adventures both in London and mainland Europe, but I hadn’t ever considered any additional options to progress my career. Although with hindsight I had plenty of other skills, my main selling points at the time had been that a) I could type and b) I had fluent German. In my initial job hunt I hadn’t looked further than this.
A secretary I became, and remained. Being able to type was my only practical skill in the job market. I wished – I still wish – I’d had other strings to my bow alongside.
Much later, in a volunteer role as secretary for a local charity, I would take my computer along to meetings and type the minutes verbatim. My ‘skill’ in getting everyword down provoked frustration amongst my fellow committee members, who would be faced with reams of paper to review between meetings. This was not an advantage to anyone – for the sake of punchy bureaucratic efficiency I really needed to be concise – but I felt I had a responsibility to get down everything that had been said, and I took this ridiculously seriously.
That’s an ironic ‘skill’ in the last paragraph, by the way. Yes, on a good day I can get words down as quickly as they are spoken, but this sausage-factory approach to transcription gets me nowhere. When I’m typing, I don’t take the text in like I do when I’m writing by hand: I’m simply transferring words from the world to my screen with no filter, no distillation, no attention. Text just lands on the page. My readers – those fellow committee members of mine – wouldn’t ever be granted the benefit of being served just the points of the discussions, and would instead have to plough through long lines and neverending paragraphs of blah.
We’re all online with our laptops and desktops and MacBooks and ChromeBooks and all sorts. Children learn keyboarding skills in the cradle. Many office staff who would once have had their own secretary now share one with other members of their department, or deal with their own correspondence altogether. These days it’s mostly online and immediate. There’s no need for a ‘bluey’ draft to go to the MD for checking, nor a top copy to send by post or carbon copy for the file – many of the things I had first learned about at the business college are near obsolete, streamlined into less work thanks to the evolution of – and our happy familiarity with – technology.
I need my computer when I’m reviewing and refining my work. But before that, writing text by hand grants me both the time and the headspace to distill, order and streamline my thoughts in a present, holistic and authentic way. I harness my thoughts about anything and everything in my pocket notebook, and then put meat on the bones with drafts and redrafts in my much larger writing notebook.
For all of my projects, writing by hand is a critical stage of the process.
And being able to navigate around a keyboard is another such stage.
Reader, I need both.
Although I’m no longer a secretary I thank my lucky stars that I am at least able to type. But I wish I hadn’t allowed my excellent keyboarding skills to clip my career wings just because they could.
Love,
Rebecca
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From ‘The Chicago Manual of Style’, via Wikipedia:
Widow
A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page or column, thus separated from the rest of the text.
Orphan
A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page or column, thus separated from the rest of the text.
Alternately, a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph. Orphans of this type give the impression of too much white space between paragraphs.
Mrs. Mether's typing class in the 8th Grade changed my life. I'm a very proud 60 wpm typist.
Clever ducky!
I didn't learn to type until I was in my late late 50's and what a challenge!
I do agree with pen and paper though. It's something I've never been able to define - happier writing a novel in longhand, an intimate process. And the bonus is that one gets to go to the stationer's and pick paper and pen. My dream would be a Mont Blanc pen. Oooh la la!
Do you ever think 'Oh, that pen would be nice?'