Typewriting

Typewriting (1971) by Pitmans College Teach Yourself Books | ISBN: 0340057394 | Condition: Good There was a time, not so very long ago, when the ability to operate a typewriter was considered an essential professional accomplishment, alongside answering a telephone politely, taking shorthand and knowing exactly how much correction fluid could be applied to a document before it became structurally unsound. In Typewriting , published in 1971 as part of the celebrated Teach Yourself Books series, Pitmans College sets out to teach the aspiring typist the noble art of transforming thoughts into neatly arranged letters on paper, using nothing more sophisticated than ten fingers, a mechanical contraption and an apparently inexhaustible supply of patience. For younger readers, a typewriter was a remarkable device resembling a computer keyboard attached to a small industrial machine. Unlike modern computers, however, it possessed no internet connection, no predictive text, no autocorrect and absolutely no sympathy for mistakes. Press the wrong key and the error remained there, glaring accusingly from the page, until you corrected it by some laborious mechanical or chemical process. The alternative was to start the entire sheet again, a prospect that encouraged an admirable degree of concentration and occasionally some remarkably inventive language. Pitmans College, an institution synonymous with practical business education and the cultivation of respectable office skills, understood that competent typing was not simply a matter of hitting the correct keys. It required posture, rhythm, accuracy, speed, discipline and the ability to manipulate paper, margins, tabs and carriage returns without becoming hopelessly entangled in the machinery. Typewriting was a craft, and like most crafts, it demanded practice, persistence and an acceptance that one?s early efforts might resemble the work of a nervous chimpanzee operating a railway signal box. This instructional volume belongs to an era when offices reverberated with the distinctive clatter of typewriters, interrupted by the occasional bell announcing the approaching end of a line. Rows of secretaries and clerks produced letters, invoices, memoranda, reports and official documents with astonishing efficiency, often while simultaneously dealing with telephones, filing systems and managers who apparently believed that a five-page letter could be typed, corrected and dispatched within three minutes. The typewriter was also one of the great levellers of professional life. Whether you were preparing correspondence for a multinational corporation, composing a furious letter to the local council or writing your first thoroughly unsuccessful novel, the same fundamental rules applied. You had to insert the paper correctly, position the margins, strike the keys with reasonable accuracy and resist the temptation to hurl the machine through the nearest window when the ribbon became tangled. Of course, by 1971 the typewriter had become a thoroughly established feature of modern civilisation. Electric models were increasingly common, although the traditional manual machine remained a familiar companion in homes, schools and workplaces. The personal computer, meanwhile, was still some years away from transforming the office into an environment where employees could spend an entire afternoon attempting to discover why a printer had inexplicably decided to go offline. One of the particular pleasures of a book such as Typewriting is the glimpse it offers into the everyday working practices of a vanished age. There is something almost touching about an era in which the correct positioning of a sheet of paper was a subject worthy of careful instruction, and where the ability to produce a properly aligned business letter could open the door to a respectable career. Today, of course, we possess word processors capable of producing beautiful documents in seconds, which we then spend forty-five minutes trying to f.…