A few days ago I sat down at my desk with a 70-year-old typewriter in front of me and a 1920s typing instruction manual propped up beside it.
I’d decided to learn proper touch typing — on a manual typewriter, using antique typing manuals.
If you’re scratching your head right now, thinking, “WTF, Lori, have you lost your mind?” I get it. Please allow me to explain.
I’m a terrible typist. And yet I collect typewriters.
I already own four of them, which should be enough for anyone sensible. But for typewriter collectors, the concept of “enough” isn’t really a thing. So lately I’ve been stalking the online marketplaces looking for a beautiful antique machine to add to the lineup, something outrageously gorgeous like the one below (but with an English keyboard, wide carriage is optional).
Finding something this old in good working order obviously won’t come cheap, and I don’t want to insult a magnificent example of early 20th-century engineering with my ham-handed typing skills. I need to earn the privilege by actually learning to type.
I’ve got a very long way to go. When typing on my computer I make a ridiculous number of mistakes, but they don’t matter. The backspace key saves the day, but also lets me get away with lazy habits and sloppy work. My typewriter, on the other hand, confronts me in stark black-and-white with every single mistake. And man, there are a ton of them. I’m genuinely ashamed when I see how ugly my pages look. I feel unworthy of the machines I already own.
It’s time to fix that.
So a few days ago I dusted off my 1956 Triumph Norm and began daily, systematic typing practice, starting from scratch. I didn’t expect it to be fun, so I was surprised at how the hours disappeared as I worked. I also didn’t expect to learn anything besides typing skills. As it turns out, my typewriter had its own ideas about what I should be learning, but more on that later.
The instruction manual I’m working through is called Rational Typewriting by Mrs. Smith Clough. The original edition was published sometime in the 1920s. My version is a scanned PDF from a later edition that I downloaded from archive.org. It’s a clean scan, and the pages render beautifully on my large iPad, which I prop up next to my typewriter.
The first thing you do when learning to type properly is work through the fingerings of all the keys, moving from the stronger index fingers outward to the weaker ring fingers and pinkies, as illustrated above.
After some basic exercises where you practice locating the keys, you’re confronted with this:
You’re using your strongest fingers here, in simple patterns. Typing the same thing for a whole line is a lot of repetition, but fortunately I managed to get through this first exercise without too much trouble and moved on to the second one.
This is where things started to go sideways — quite spectacularly.
At first glance it looks almost insultingly easy, but don’t be fooled. Even rudimentary exercises like this require concentration if you want to do them perfectly. It was concentration that turned out to be a challenge. I’d be merrily typing away and before I knew it I’d be typing letters in reverse without even realizing. I’d reset, focus, and continue. A few seconds later my brain would suddenly seize up, fingers frozen, no idea where they were supposed to go. I was shocked at how easily my mind would wander and how difficult it was to focus long enough to get through a simple exercise without a ton of careless mistakes.
The photo below shows what a hard time I had focusing on that second exercise.
Notice how much trouble I had with ury. I had to type three lines of it, and not one of them is perfect. And I somehow managed to type nearly a whole line of ruy without even realizing it.
I have a whole stack of pages like this from those first few days of typing exercises.
My typewriter was already teaching me a lesson I wasn’t expecting: Concentration is a skill. And if you don’t use it, you lose it. And clearly I’d lost it.
Years of using computers and living online had quietly done a number on my attention span. My brain felt lazy, sluggish, broken. It probably started in the mid-2000s, when Google made remembering things optional. Then smartphones put an endless supply of entertainment and instant boredom-relief in our pockets. Finally, Social media delivered the kill shot with diabolical, weapons-grade attention hijacking capabilities — irresistible apps that — by design — completely take over your brain, without you even noticing.
And all the while, computers had been doing more and more of our cognitive work for us. I mean, when was the last time you had to figure out how to hyphenate a word at the end of a line of text, or worry about how to spell a word at all? Computers cheerfully forgive sloppiness and permit endless revisions and edits. But all of that so-called convenience disappears when you’re using a typewriter.
Typewriters offer no extra assistance to lazy users with distracted brains. Yes, they’ll work for you all day, doing exactly what you tell them to do. But they demand your full attention and force you to use your brain to actually do stuff. Typewriters dole out swift penalties for your losing focus, visible scars in bold black ink on the paper in front of you.
You are only rewarded if you approach your work with diligence and care. Which, I’ve come to realize, is exactly what these magnificent old machines deserve.
Now, I just have to become that person.
