Thursday, February 16, 2012

Student reflections on typewriting (II)

Here is another student's essay about typewriting. (Both students used a Lettera 22 to type a class presentation; this student chose to use the same machine to write about the typing experience.)

8 comments:

  1. This must have been quite an experience for your students, not having used a typewriter before. Maybe for an "advance course" you could show them a neat trick, if you work with a machine fitted with polyethylene ribbon: you can erase mistakes placing a small piece of Scotch tape in front of the ribbon and typing the character again. (That's how I fix my mistakes in my IBM Selectric I and the model 196 without the correcting feature).

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  2. It's amusing and interesting to read the story of a newbie struggling with the finesses of typewriting. :)

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  3. I can see the lazy pinky typing the "a" key. I will say, after a few years, your pinkies do get a heck of a lot stronger. It helps when playing guitar, too!

    Another fun introspective to read.

    You are going to have to tell the student that you do get faster over time. I think I type pretty close to the same speed on a typewriter as a keyboard, and both are certainly faster than handwriting!

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  4. Funny how they ended up appreciating writing by hand! That is an odd conclusion, but I suppose it is to be expected if it is their first time. You should reassure them that typewriting gets a lot faster than writing by hand; it will just take some getting used to!

    Thanks for sharing these perspectives with us; I am always curious to know how others respond to using a typewriter for the first time.

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    1. Yes! Down with captcha! How liberating! I just had to comment to try it out for myself (just kidding, I really did like your post :-)). Thanks, Richard ;)

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  5. It is so good that the students get to try their hand at typing. The thing is with a keyboard, even if they learned proper keyboarding, is that rythum and correct key pressure are a technique that must be developed for good typing speed and accuracy as well as they need to think to make the 1 and the ! since early machines did not have either.

    Thanks for sharing their experiences.

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  6. Are you doing a brief tutorial? They keep mentioning pressing hard but they need only press sharply. Interesting reflections.

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