No more White-Out

Next time you’re tempted to wish for the good ol’ days, compare and contrast typing to keyboarding.

For younger readers, a brief primer: We’ve not always had computers for word processing. There was a time not-oh-so-long ago when everything was either written by hand or typed directly onto paper.

For older readers never forced into the computer age, a brief primer: Most of us now “type” digitally, with the information entering a computer program, where it may be changed and finalized before printing ... no more eraser smudges.

Yes, kids, our typewriters back in the day actually transferred each character directly to the paper the moment you struck a key. Today, should you type, “My name os,” you can simply tap the backspace key a couple of times with your right pinkie and change it to, “My name is.”

On a typewriter, you had to stop, slide the carriage to one side or the other so as to not get eraser crumbs in the mechanism, roll the paper up a couple of lines, remove the “o” with a special eraser, reposition the paper and carriage and type the “i,” hopefully hitting the correct spot.

Along came White-Out Liquid Paper. It was something like paint or fingernail polish and you painted over the error, blew on it until it dried and corrected your mistake.

Either form of correction made for an ugly sheet of paper, so you were required to be extra careful while typing. In particular, you needed to know what you intended to say before you started typing.

Especially while writing something like I’m doing at this moment, I often delete words, sentences, even an entire paragraph, simply because I changed my mind about what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it.

Even when typing something that did not have to be pretty, such as a news story back when I was a young reporter, it was easier to simply let something stay the way it was than to go through the steps necessary to make a change.

Something else different today is the universality of typing ... or keyboarding, if you must. Every kid learns to type. How early? I’m not sure. Fourth grade? Earlier?

Typing in my age wasn’t even considered an option until high school. Most who took the class seemed to do so their sophomore year, but it was not required, not even to get into college.

Indeed, it wasn’t even required to get a job as a journalist.

I’ve known more than a few people through the years who worked as professional writers who did not know how to “touch type.”

Touch type is what we called typing correctly, the way you younger readers learned to keyboard with your index fingers resting on the “f” and “j” keys.

Those who did not learn to touch type but found themselves needing to work on a typewriter used what many called the “hunt and peck” method, where they hunted down the correct key and pecked it with whatever finger was most convenient, usually one of the index fingers.

As they became more proficient at it, we referred to them as two-finger typists and they could speed along almost as fast as regular typists who used all of their fingers. The major drawback was they had to watch the keyboard more closely.

While there was something magical about the sound of a typewriter ... or a roomful of typewriters ... clacking away, I have no desire to return to the good ol’ days of typing.

I mean, did you ever see a typerwriter ... I mean a typewriter ... with a spell-check?