Hunting and pecking for a living

ONCE IN A WHILE somebody will ask me how many words I have written during my career as a professional writer. I can honestly say I don’t know. Millions, certainly. Maybe even millions of millions. But I don’t know. Only amateurs count the words.

For 20 years I wrote a 1,000-word newspaper column six days a week. I seem to remember that came to about 5,000 columns. At the same time I wrote editorials for seven years. That’s somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 editorials. Then I wrote editorials full-time for another paper for two years, six a week. That’s an extra 600 or so.  

Then I wrote books about boats. Twelve or so were accepted by publishers. Three or four never did find a home. In between, I wrote articles for magazines. I never kept count of them, but there were certainly scores, possibly hundreds. And these days I write columns for my blog. I’ve done more than 900 so far. So what I say to the people who ask is “Go ahead, you do the math.”

The second thing they ask is why I never learned to touch-type. They see me hunting and pecking at the keyboard and jump to the conclusion that I was never taught properly. Well I was, as a matter of fact.

One of the subjects we studied at journalists’ college was touch-typing. We were all young men, then, of course. Women newspaper reporters were very rare at that time. I don’t think our editors trusted them to know what news was. We certainly didn’t have any women cub reporters at our college.

We took lessons in typing from a rather nice middle-aged lady who wore a resigned look on her face. She knew what would happen. She knew the young male reporters bursting with testosterone and awash with hormones would never want to be seen touch-typing in the newsroom like a bunch of fairies. Real reporters pounded their typewriters with two fingers and swore at the keys when they got stuck.

We didn’t actually wear fedoras and trench coats, and we all did pass our typing exams because we had to, to keep our jobs, but as soon as we got back to our respective newspaper offices we all abandoned touch-typing and regressed to manly hunting and pecking.

For one thing, it made our stories more concise, which endeared us to the copy editors. They had great power over us. They could change our spelling and our grammar and cuss us out in front of everybody. We were very scared of the copy editors.

The other thing about two-finger typing was that it slowed down the communication between the brain and the fingertips. That was a good thing because it gave you a chance to criticize your writing. When we did eventually get a woman in the reporters’ room she was hated by the copy editors because her stories were always three times as long as they needed to be, and filled with useless twiddly-bits, as if she were chatting idly to her next-door neighbor.

The problem, as we figured it out, was that she was a star touch-typist. She typed at the speed of a blazing comet. She didn’t have to think about where to find the m or the n or remember when to hit the caps lock or anything. Her fingers flew to each hidden key surely and automatically, and there was nothing to stop the steady stream of words from her brain flowing straight out of her fingertips, no time to assess the true sense of the words that flowed like Niagara out of her typewriter, no chance to do a modicum of self-editing as she wrote.

In the press club bar in the evening, the poor copy editors who had the dreaded task of cutting her copy down to size would order large whiskies with shaking hands and we young-blood male reporters would shake our heads solemnly and commiserate with them. We actually bought them drinks when we could afford it. It was always a good thing to keep in with the copy editors.

I still hunt and peck. I am still an atrocious typist. But what the heck. Who cares? I don’t have to worry about copy editors any more. And, glory be, the keys don’t get stuck together now, either.

Today’s Thought

He wrote for certain papers which, as everybody knows,

Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.

— Rudyard Kipling

Tailpiece

There was an old lady of Worcester

Who was often annoyed by a rorcester.

She cut off his head

Until he was dead,

And now he don’t crow like he yorcester.

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

On hunting and pecking

I WAS JUST SITTING HERE wondering what I could write about boats when it occurred to me I should be writing about typing.

My grandson is being taught to type at school. “You just line up the B with your belly button,” he tells me, pointing to the keyboard, “and then you put your hands here.”

A computer is teaching him this. It tells him when he makes mistakes and it awards him marks when he does things right.

I was old enough to vote before I could type. All through my years in school I got along quite nicely by holding a pointed thing in my hand and writing words down on paper. But for today’s young scholar, touch-typing is part of the electronic revolution. Computers demand it. 

When I was about 20 I got a job as a reporter and was sent off to a college for cadet journalists. There, 15 or so of us, all men, were confronted by a very patient lady from the local typing school, and a host of battered typewriters.

Now, I have to tell you that we men thought touch-typing was a bit sissy, and the faster and better you typed, the more sissified you were. We did have enough sense to learn sufficient touch-typing to pass the tests, but as soon as we got back to our respective newspapers all over the country, we stopped touch-typing and went back to our former tough-guy ways of hunting and pecking with two fingers.

Two-finger typing was OK. We figured if cowboys typed, they’d use two fingers. James Bond, too. And just in case anyone had any doubts about our masculinity, we used really bad swearwords while we typed, and smoked like crazy. Unfiltered cigarettes, of course.

Having to type your stories was the biggest drawback to reporting. There was always that little nagging feeling that typing was women’s work. In those days, typists sat in typing pools, occasionally exposing their legs to be admired when manly reporters walked past. I know this isn’t politically correct now but it was condoned then by everyone except a small and vociferous band of women journalists who were busy trying to get the editor to change the name of the Women’s Pages to Lifestyle. I’m not saying any of this was right or wrong. I’m just reporting the facts.

There was one big advantage to two-finger typing. It created a mechanical barrier between your brain and your fingertips, a microsecond in which you could exercise some critical judgment and editing before the words spilled out onto the paper. It resulted in shorter, snappier, more logical stories, we felt, and earned us the love and respect of the copy editors.

There was a woman reporter on one paper I worked for who could type like greased lightning. When she sat down behind her Underwood her fingers were a blur, a sort of fleshy haze of furious motion, and the typefaces actually whistled through the air before crashing into the paper like tiny meteorites. But we men reporters were not in the least bit jealous of her proficiency because the copy editors hated her.

Her thoughts just poured straight out of her fingertips in torrents uninterrupted by logic or brevity. Her stories were always too long and rambling. You could hear the groans from the copy editors’ room when a story of hers reached them, and some poor copy editor had to slash and patch for 20 minutes while the air turned blue around him.

I fear for what’s happening today. If computers are teaching boys that there’s no shame in touch-typing, the world of written words is about to be flooded with unrestrained verbiage. Maybe it is already. I’m sure glad I’m not a copy editor.

Today’s Thought

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,
I rede you tent it:
A chield’s amang you takin’ notes,
And faith he prent it.
— Robert Burns, On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland

Tailpiece

“What did you get your girl friend for her birthday?”
“I gave her a bikini.”
“Why a bikini?”
“I’m hoping to see her beam with delight.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)