When I was in high school, my father strongly suggested to me that I should take a typing class. He learned to type during a time when boys weren't usually taught to type because they weren't going to be secretaries and he said it was a very handy skill to have. So I sat in the back row of the 6th period typing class and did my typing exercises asdf jkl; and eventually got the hang of it.
Aside from reading, I'd say it's the most useful thing I ever learned in school. Okay, let's say it's tied with math for second place, but the need to type comes up way more often than a need to prove geometry theorems or to quote the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in middle-english. I don't have much opportunity to sing the preamble to the Constitution or to discuss themes from The Bridge of San Luis Ray but I type every day.
My brother does not know how to type. Well, not properly, at least. He claims he never received the advice to take typing class. I guess that's possible, but perhaps he just wasn't paying attention or he never had a 6th period elective to kill. I don't know how he managed to get through a graduate program only hunting and pecking, but, he says, there's no point in learning to type now that it's over.
He can be grateful now, though, that he never learnt. Because popping up all over the internet, I am now seeing people proclaiming that their number one pet peeve is this: People who put two spaces after the punctuation at the end of a sentence.
I was vaguely aware that two spaces was a hold over from monofaced typeface where all the letters were the same size and therefore two spaces were needed for differentiation. However, I figured it didn't really matter that much, sort of the same way we use ' to mean feet and " to mean inches when actually those are quotation marks and not the correct marks for feet and inches at all. I can't remember what the correct marks are called, but they slant toward the right and are way more complicated to reproduce on your computer.
Having learned to type on an old IBM Selectric, I double space at the end of my sentences. Actually, since I was vaguely aware that it wasn't necessary, I tend to go both ways. If I end up editing or pasting a sentence, it probably will have one space at the end. If I typed it and never looked back, it probably will have two.
Apparently, my double spacing after a sentence is annoying to the grammar sticklers out there who have given up trying to make people use apostrophes correctly. I've laughed lots of times at "CD's" and "cherrie's" for sale, but now that I'm on the receiving end, the grammar nazis are not so funny. The only reasons given for not using two spaces are "It's not necessary." and "It's slightly harder to read." Eh. I'm a little annoyed at the derogatory way the extra space is viewed. It's a bad habit- one worth breaking. It's "obnoxious." It's "spacing trash."
I think there should be a little more compassion and understanding. Why don't they just let us old typewriter taught typists do our own thing and call it "generational?" Teach new typists the new way and eventually the "arcane" way will die off. Right? Just stay off my case and let me do what I want with my own space bar.
