I confess to having made no effort to improve my handwriting since first learning to use a pen in the third grade. During the mid ’60s in the elementary school I attended, several classrooms consisted of combined grades. Mine was a 3rd and 4th grade combo. The most vivid memory I have of the classroom was when 4th grader Mary Appledorne was assigned to coach a few of us with techniques to improve our handwriting. With the wisdom of an 11 year old, Mary told me my handwriting would never improve if I didn’t stop trying to “draw” the words I was writing. She was right, in fact these days my handwriting is worse than ever, because I rarely use it.
When I do produce handwritten correspondence, it is with great care and intention. This got me thinking of how fortunate I was to have experienced regular correspondence in handwritten form. Though I was in possession of a ’70s vintage typewriter during my college years (it belonged to my older sister who’d already graduated), it seemed impersonal to use it to write a letter. I reflect on those days and the summer when my girlfriend, whom I’m now married to, was studying overseas in France. We corresponded via the post and mailed each other handwritten letters nearly every day. It was the practice in those days to purchase a box of stationery with matching envelopes for personal correspondence.
With respect to letters and my horrible handwriting, I wrote out my letters on cheap scrap paper and worked on a size and format to fit the page size and desired margin of the drugstore bought stationary I kept for such purposes. When I was happy with the message, I’d transpose it to the stationary with a lined sheet beneath, in order to keep my sentences even, avoiding an appearance of drooping or swinging up. The process was time consuming, but well worth the knowledge that my girlfriend would receive a well crafted message arriving with confidence and care.
One of the interesting aspects of postal correspondence was the “time warp” factor. I’d receive a letter that was written in excess of a week earlier and respond to it as though the news was immediate and in the present. A week or more later, my reply would be received, stretching this time warp across an extended period. As a result, the content of a letter sometimes took on a different character, covering news and information about past, present, and forecast events of from our personal lives.
One best decisions I made as a highschool student was to take a typing class in the 9th grade. Aside from learning to really mash the keys of a mechanical typewriter to get an even shade of ink for each character and having an awareness of how many spaces were useable after carriage return bell chimed, I acquired a skill that served me well to this day. Rarely do I think about which keys my fingers are tapping while composing on my laptop. In fact, as instinctual it is for me to use a keyboard, I couldn’t tell you with ease what the six keys are beneath the top row of the letters “QWERTY”.
The typewriter became widely available sometime in the mid-late 1860s and though anticipated to be obsolete with the advent of the “word processor” in the mid-80s and certainly by now in the age of personal computing, it is still reported to be widely used in India. The ’70s vintage “Smith Corona Classic 12” manual typewriter that I used throughout my undergraduate years, had a basket of character keys, that produced a font called “Elite 66” in pica 10. With such a machine there was no changing of the font. The only thing that I ever really changed was the ink ribbon. My mother owned and used an ancient 30s vintage “Underwood” typewriter. It operated pretty much the same as the model I had, but when I was a boy, I remember getting scolded for mashing the keys and getting the character letter arms in a tangle and all bunched up. While learning to type in highschool, I discovered that the typewriter keys are set up for the most efficient positions for those typing in the English Language. The arrangement was also designed to minimize entanglement of the character arms.
Using a typewriter for written correspondence was perhaps an even more complicated procedure writing by hand. One had to physically set up the machine for the various margins and tabs. Making corrections was a multi step process involving remembering the exact spaces and number of rotations of the spool when releasing the carriage to erase the typo (You didn’t want your erasures to fall into the mechanism of the key basket or the entire machine would jam). You’d then have to reposition the spool and paper to the exact position it was in previously to complete the correction. In essence, one became highly sensitized and motivated to learn to type without error.
Reflecting on where all this landed me as a writer, I experienced a certain nostalgia of the rhythm and music that came while typing a term paper in college. The tapping of the keys at an even tempo that kept the keys from jamming, the mental count of available spaces at the chime of the return bell along with deciding where and if to hyphen before guiding the carriage return to the next line. All are in the past now as fond memories. I do love my laptop and the smooth agile keys that enable high speed writing, but I confess now to being a key masher for life.
QWERTY info and image attributed to: By MichaelMaggs – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2637848