Learning to Type

I wrote recently about my 8th-grade graduation in June 1999 and my parents’ absence for that event. Their absence, and in particular my mother’s inability to drive me places, caused me further consternation that summer.

I had decided to enroll in a summer school class on typing at the high school that summer. As an incoming 9th grader, I was eligible to take high school courses. I thought learning to type would be a helpful skill to have, and my parents encouraged me. Neither of them was a good typist, though my grandmother (Nanny Winnie, whose handwriting was atrocious) was an excellent typist. But Nanny Winnie wouldn’t be around to type my high school papers.

I didn’t want to take the typing class during the regular school year. The high school had a pretty good business curriculum, and the regular typing classes were full of girls aspiring to be secretaries or do other office work. If I took typing as a regular class, it would count in my GPA. If I took it in summer school, it wouldn’t count. I had no faith in my skills as a typist. I was a klutz, had no sense of rhythm, and I was sure these inadequacies would spill over into typing. Plus, I had a whole slate of more substantive classes I planned to take in 9th and 10th grades.

Summer school started while my parents were still in Europe in June 1999. For the first couple of weeks, I had to ride my bike across town to get to the high school. It was a three-mile trip each way, and getting there was uphill. I could take a route that was all uphill, or I could take a route that was partly flat and then had a steep uphill at the end. I didn’t like either choice.

I hated riding my bike. I was never one of those kids who rode my bike to friends’ houses, to the river, to parks, etc. I did it occasionally when friends insisted, but I didn’t enjoy it. So biking to high school every day was a real chore. In the heat of the Richland summer, I arrived all sweaty and not eager to sit in a classroom and type.

As I had suspected, it was a good thing I didn’t take typing during the regular school term, because I was really awful at it. The constant clattering of a roomful of students practicing during class made me nervous. And for some reason, I usually got one of the old manual typewriters in the back of the room, rather than the brand new IBM Selectrics that made up the first couple of rows of machines. The keys stuck on the manual typewriter, just like the ones on my mother’s typewriter at home.

But I plugged away at it. Maybe pounded away is a better term. I gamely took the timed tests, but by the time words with errors were factored out, my typing speed was about 15 words per minute. Not enough for a passing grade, had that been my primary objective.

By the end of the term, I think I managed 30 words per minutes once or twice. But not regularly. My error rate was still too high. Still, I learned enough to handle the hunt and peck method on my high school term papers. So that’s how I typed all through high school.

And college.

And law school.

Then I became a lawyer and had a secretary assigned to me. I was expected to dictate, which involved another learning curve. But I didn’t have to type my own work.

In the early 1980s, the legal department where I worked acquired a couple of PCs—some of the first PCs in the company. I saw the promise of personal computing (A machine that corrects one’s errors! Without retyping the whole page! What a miracle!) and started learning how to use the PC. That’s when I finally learned to type. But not before the administrative staff in the department laughed at me for keeping the CAPS LOCK button on so I wouldn’t have to remember to hit the Caps key at the start of every sentence.

Over the next few years, I became a decent typist. I’m fairly fast not. And somewhat more accurate. Though I’m not sure I could make my living as a legal assistant.

Nevertheless, I’ve typed all my novels—many times over, given all the editing I do. Plus all my posts and other work. I’m better than average among the writers I know.

It all started with that summer school class in 1999. But thankfully, it didn’t end there.

Did you ever take a class you struggled with?