Back before computers

I was hunting through a file drawer for something else entirely, and came across an artifact from a political campaign from about thirty years back. It's a sort of script I developed for doing a phone or door-to-door survey of voters in the first canvass during an election.

I typed this thing out five or six times before I had it the way I wanted, and then got out what must have been a purple felt-tip to draw the flow arrows.

Nowadays, of course, I would just fire up Gliffy or one of its online design cousins and drag-n-drop until I had the flow I wanted, in a chart I could edit as needed. And then I could launch Apache Flex (or the technology of your choice) and build a little app for mobile devices to display the script in an interactive form so the campaign worker wouldn't have to struggle with clipboard and paper and the app could throw survey responses back to a central database.

Time to run off the newsletter!

But I'm glad I had the chance to write on a manual typewriter with correction fluid near to hand, to painstakingly carve text into a stencil and then run off copies of key documents on a Gestetner duplicator. Since it was so hard to correct something once it got typed or drawn, you learned to compose in your head to near-final quality, rather than just flinging words at the screen and editing afterwards. You might even write things out by hand with a pen and a pad of paper before turning to the typing machine.

I think having to do mental composition, and then the tactile exercise of forming the words in ink, before typing what others might see helped me think more clearly about what I was writing and why I was writing it. It also means I have an endless stock of boring pre-computer stories to stun younger people with.