First is a set of comment about writing style

JOA · Joined: 13 May 2004 Posts: 1703

I can type pretty well if I don’t think about it. OK, it's not really typing. It's keyboarding. Microsoft's Word and other software have features that make the one different from the other. But whatever it is I do with QWERTY, just as soon as I try to watch myself do it, I can't.

There's something of an analogy from typing to writing. As much as I like Brian Garner, I see good reason to favor Joseph Williams for his more structured advice in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. I expect to have more to say about this later. For now, I will say of Williams' book that his first so many chapters are full of good stuff about using nouns and verbs as actors and actions for telling a story.

But from there Williams moves on to topics, themes, issues, and points. This are all terms he defines in somewhat unfamiliar ways. After he gets past the basics his advice on writing still looks good—sort of, anyway. But it's complicated enough so that attempting to apply it turns out to be somewhat similar to trying to watch myself type.

Insider (Ret) · Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 10:31 pm Post subject:

Interesting. I swear, the best course I took in high school was not physics, chemistry or Latin. It was typing. Ms. Day taught the class; she was born and raised in our small town, went off to college, and came back to teach business, including typing. One utterly irrelevant fact about Ms. Day was that she was from one of the two African American families in this small town. Hers was the middle class one; the other family was more working class, I suppose one would say. She was a very good teacher, and I learned to type well enough that I almost never used a "secretary" throughout my career. Or if I did, it was for things other than "typing/document preparation." I could type it faster in draft/final than I could dictate and/or write out in longhand. When computers arrived and carbon paper went bye-bye, I was in 7th heaven. I was liberated.

And I can still type if I look at my hands. But not as well as if I DON'T look. I wonder what phenomenon is involved here.

deltajudge · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Posts: 187

It's funny. When I was in high school, boys didn't didn't take typing or shorthand, but a bunch of us decided to. Miz Gregory was our teacher. Well we jumped in there, I opted out of shorthand to my regret, but got into typing. I found my home position and went at it. One of the best decisions I made in my life. It serves me to this day. Cool