Well, now, before I get off into the usual boring recitation of the minutiae of my life, one thought occurred to me last night, related to the recent implosion of Dan Rather’s credibility in re the supposed memo passed to him by an “unimpeachable” source.

We had gotten home from church last night, eaten supper, and it was time for me to get to work on my OTHER full time job and do some stuff for church. We’re in the process of hiring a surveyor, and since I know about that stuff, I volunteered to get the RFPs together and send them out to some surveyors.

I went and bought some of the standard American Institute of Architects forms for this, mainly because they allow you to check off boxes to tailor the request to get the exact information you need. You send it off, the surveyor sends it back signed, and if you agree to the price, you sign it and work starts.

Now, the thing about the standard forms is that they are just that--forms. They have to be filled in. Now, I suppose you could just use a pen and tic-mark stuff, but that looks very unprofessional, so the best thing is to haul out the old Smith-Corona portable and get to work.

Yes, an actual typewriter. I learned to type on a real typewriter, and all through high school and college wrote every paper I ever typed using a real typewriter. Since coming to work in my current employ, I have used a computer keyboard approximately eight hours every day for the past nine years. I can pretty much figure my way around the keyboard without having to hunt and peck.

But last night, as I was filling out those forms, something else struck me as being fishy about those Dandy Dan Documents--there are no corrections. Not that there aren’t mistakes, but there aren’t any corrections.

Anyone who ever typed anything can pretty much be guaranteed to make one misspelling, or one transposition. What we did back in the olden days was either X over it and start again; or roll the paper up, erase the offending letter, and type it back; or use some of that wonderful Liquid Paper stuff, and type over it; or if you were really fancy-schmancy, you MIGHT have a correcting typewriter.

My little S-C portable is a self-corrector, but let me tell you something right now--every mistake, even though it is more or less corrected, is still highly visible as having been a correction. The correction tape just doesn’t cover up the old letter completely, because it hammers a little metal type into the paper. No matter what, that impression still ghosts through the correct letter.

So, even on the nicest typewritten papers, you still see the odd correction or two. Back in the olden days, you just overlooked stuff like that, because everyone knew that what you had was the best you could do.

But nowadays, corrections don’t ever show.

You fix what you see, and rely on autocorrect to catch stuff, but what’s printed out doesn’t have overlapped letters, or faint correction marks, or lower case Ns made into Ms, or smears of Wite-Out, or the host of other crap that used to be artifacts of using a typewriter.

No corrections--erasures, overstrikes, fluid, tape--on that CYA memo.

I’m not a document expert, but I have used a typewriter before. Sorry, Mr. Rather, but no matter what your host of “experts” have told you, the memo you keep waving in the air was done on a computer.

UPDATE 9/14--I was just now clicking around the Axis of Weevil blogroll and noticed that pajama-clad Steven Taylor made the exact same point about typewritten sloppiness on Sunday afternoon.
posted by Terry at 9:38:00 AM