By Jason Wilson
This is a continuation on my series dedicated to bad ad copy I wrote back in the mid to late 90s. I hope you enjoy it.
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Tappety-tap. Ding!
These are familiar sounds to those of us old enough to remember them. Two fingers laboring away on a manual typewriter and the quick ping of the carriage return. It was a true marriage between brain and brawn—your mind working to complete the thought and your hands fighting the tension in the keys making it all the harder to get the words on paper.
But then IBM changed the way we thought about our old Underwoods, Smith-Coronas, and Royals. Typing no longer had to be difficult because we had been given the Selectric. We used to call the old Selectrics “golfball typewriters” because the silver, spherical print element looked like one. The days of two and four finger typing gave way to ten-finger touch-typing, where your fingers rested just ever so gently on top of the “home keys.” And when you typed, the golf ball spun and jerked alarmingly (and depending upon what you were typing, perhaps infuriatingly), slapping the letters up in rapid-fire succession. It was loud, but beautiful.
Perhaps we could have contented ourselves with the Selectric, but our drive to improve the quality of our lives was too great. So while we were busying ourselves with the Selectric, IBM introduced us to the ultimate typewriter, the personal computer. And with some sadness we bid farewell to the clackety-clack of the Selectric and began a new relationship with this square-headed friend. We haven’t been the same since.
For well over a hundred years folks have been typing. Whether on a manual or electric typewriter or a computer keyboard, we’ve pounded out letters, articles, journals, memos, forms, and now blogs. And as time progressed, we ended up spending more and more time at the keys—perhaps too much. What once liberated us from the time-consuming task of handwriting, now tethers us to box and a monitor, portable or otherwise.
One of our goals in writing and producing law books is to give a little slack in that tether. That’s why we make forms books. We take the stuff from our commentaries books, like Texas Rules * Civil Trials, and put it into a plain-English form. All you need to do is fill in the blanks. And if you really want to cut down on typing, use an electronic copy of the form off the CD-ROM. Either way, you’ll spend less time at the keyboard. After all, isn’t that what progress is all about?
[Image (cc) by Anthony Albright]
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