The typist and her typing manual

The conventions of business correspondence began to seep into mainstream typography during the early years of the twentieth century. Believe it or not, the use of a double or triple space after a full point had a practical logic when the limitations of the typewriter were taken into account, but adding spaces after punctuation was not the only nasty habit to transfer to the compositor's type stick. Published in Baseline.

For several generations, secretarial staff produced the correspondence and all other forms of administrative documentation required by every business and organisation. The all-women typing pool, with its own hierarchy and strict regimes, was often described as the ‘heart’ of an organisation. The personal or departmental secretary became a hybrid image of formality and efficiency – qualities which were formulated in large part by the rules of the typing manual. Personal assistants, secretaries and typists were trained in-house and/or at commercial college: typewriting, shorthand, business conventions, and English (with an emphasis on spelling, grammar, terminology and punctuation). 

The authority of the typewritten document quickly became an essential commercial tool. The crude, mechanistic appearance of the characters punched onto the company note-paper through the ink-soaked textile ribbon was in no way detrimental to its commercial viability. Nor were the severe limitations of only eighty-eight key-options. In fact, the resulting idiosyncratic characteristics of the typewritten document made it immediately recognisable, and, once established in larger and successful companies, all other businesses, no matter how small, had to own one in order to present themselves to the outside world as a commercially viable manufacturer, merchant or service. 

The conventions of the typing manual were of only limited interest to typographers until digital technology provided everyone with desktop publishing software. During the last twenty years, the influence of the typing manual has increased considerably, whilst the demise of the corporate typing pool has been equally dramatic. This increased influence is not so much because typists are now doing DTP work (although, of course, the few that remain still are) but that a surprisingly high percentage of everyone else who now prepare texts in the commercial sector, still revert to those same limitations and conventions that are associated with the typewriter. 

Given the opportunity to produce documents using DTP software, why do so many people continue to use the conventions of the typist? Conventions such as the use of double or even triple spaces after full-points, exclamation marks and question marks; double spacing after colons and semi-colons; underlining; the use of single or double prime marks to indicate quotations (rather than the turned comma and apostrophe); and the use of the hyphen for en- and em-dashes. The misuse of the hyphen and prime marks could be put down to a lack of knowledge of the appropriate characters. But the other examples are surely done in the full knowledge that these are not the conventions of the printed book or any other standard printed document.

Typewriters began to be used in the commercial environment during the 1870s and the first manuals were published in the 1880s. These, initially, were more concerned with the mechanics and maintenance of the typewriter, but quickly evolved to include ‘good practice’ in the ordering and arrangement of correspondence, tables, legal documents etc. Later manuals included the presentation of typographic details, such as the use of punctuation, capital letters and underlining. One of the earliest of the more comprehensive manuals was Pitman’s A Manual of the Typewriter, published in 1893, in which margins, addresses, line-spacing, paragraphs and conclusions were all dealt with. The manual also included facsimile examples, a practice which set the pattern for all later typing manuals. 

For the trainee typist the emphasis was on adherence to rules. Speed and accuracy were the aims, and so there was a distinct advantage if discretion could be avoided. It would not be uncommon when a lengthy document is required in a hurry, for five or six typists to work on a text concurrently. In such circumstances, ‘corporate unity’ was essential. The same reasoning was upheld in larger printing houses in which all the compositors (who might be working in shifts) worked to a strict house style.

Conventions built around mechanics 

There were, and remain, intrinsic technical limitations with the typewriter; there are, after all, (generally) only 88 characters available. This meant, for example, there is no em- or en-dash, only the hyphen, which must be used to fulfil three distinct requirements. When an en-dash was insisted upon, two hyphens (with an unavoidable small space between them) were recommended. Nor were there italic or bold characters, and so, to provide emphasis, typists were instructed to underline, use capitals (which, some manuals recommended might be 'character-spaced' for ‘additional effect’) or, for maximum impact, underline-spaced capitals. According to Pitman, in the 1893 edition of A Manual of the Typewriter, the underline (described as an underscore) should be used to emphasise ‘such words as would be italicised in ordinary print, and for foreign words and expressions.’ Other typing manuals added, for example, that the titles of publications, plays and the names of ships should be underlined. Later manuals began to promote the use of double quote (in fact, prime) marks for published titles and the like, possibly because the underline is so visually obtrusive, but more likely because it was more time-efficient. Underlining was time-consuming because the typist had to return the carriage to the beginning of the word and then type the underline. 

Although the conventional option was available, for example, where a choice of both single and double quotes is available, even in the UK, where single quotes have been the preferred option throughout the twentieth century, typing manuals advocated the use of the more visually prominent double quote. Only in the last thirty years have typing manuals recommended the use of single quotes. (The single ‘quote’ also serves to indicate the dimension foot; whilst the double ‘quote’ indicates dimension inch: 3’ 6” for example.) 

However, the most notorious convention in typing remains the use of incremental spacing after punctuation marks. Again, Pitman’s manual of 1893 recommended that commas be followed by a single space; colons and semi-colons by two spaces; and full points, question and exclamation marks be followed by three spaces. Other manuals, at the time and since, vary in their advice, but even in 1977, Pitman’s The Typewriting Dictionary (E Mackay) states that the use of a single space after a full point is not good practice and ‘may be penalised in typing examinations’. 

The necessity for such large spaces after certain punctuation marks can perhaps be explained by the crudity of the early typewritten document. Early machines made horizontal alignment impossible to accurately maintain and, depending upon the manufacturer, some of these machines only had capitals or lowercase. However, by 1893, when one of the first comprehensive manuals was published by Pitman, these technical limitations had been effectually eliminated. The problems common in contemporary typed documents were listed as: irregularity of impression; irregularity of spacing; unevenness at the beginning of paragraphs; lines of typing not parallel with the top of the paper; uneven spacing between lines; misuse of certain characters (for example the misrepresentation of numerals 1 and 0); bad alignment; as well as finger marks and smudges. 

Each character, whether the i or the w, occupied exactly the same amount of horizontal space (and the same amount of space as allocated for interword spaces) giving a line of text a loose and particularly uneven appearance. The uneven spaces within and between the characters is exactly what well designed and well set type avoids. To ensure that this unavoidable unevenness did not interfere with the readability of the text, it was probably felt that extra spaces were necessary to signal, for maximum clarity, the end of a sentence. 

The need for additional space after a full point had also been a requirement in legal documents; deeds for solicitors, ledgers for accountants, which had traditionally been written with the metal-nibbed pen before the advent of the typewriter. The necessity of accuracy and clarity in such documents, plus the difficulty of writing an emphatic full-stop using such a pen (that could not be mistaken for a comma) was well known, and so it was general practice for the scrivener to leave a longer space after a full-stop than after a comma. 

A less likely connection might be the transmission of messages by morse code to distinguish when, for example, the word ‘stop’ means stop or the end of a sentence. In order to clarify meaning the operator would be required to pause, for perhaps, one second after a comma, but for two seconds after a full-point. 

Whilst the mechanisms introduced later to the typewriter improved alignment both horizontally and vertically, the spring mechanism only partly alleviated the irregularity of impression. Type design and typographic layout generally aim to provide an even, visual colour/texture, the idiosyncrasies of the typewriter meant that those advocating its use felt obliged to advise the use of additional clues for the reader to compensate for the irregularity of impression. Thus, double and triple phrase-spaces, just like double quotes, provided additional definition of punctuation. 

A little later, another device for giving the reader special emphasis of items within a typewritten document was to use a two-colour typewriter ribbon, allowing the typist choice of black or (normally) red, but only on the top copy; carbon-copies would remain a single colour typescript. 

Looking at typed business correspondence now, such extreme procedures seem unnecessary and, once the typewriter had been accepted as an appropriate mode of communication, they effectively became redundant. The fact that the use of additional spaces remained the rule appears to be due to nothing more than convention – a sense of it being the ‘right thing to do’. Interestingly, the equivalent of triple or even quadruple spaces is used in the technical information, commercially letterpress-printed, on advertisements for typewriters.

Links with other technologies 

The impact and success of ‘visible writing’ machines, aided by formidable advertising campaigns, was remarkable, and the distinctive appearance of the typed letter came to represent the embrace of modernism and efficient business and commerce practice. In contrast, the use of handwritten correspondence in a commercial context quickly came to represent a company stuck in the past, or the rank amateur. Advertising, particularly of the early twentieth century, would often represent the wasteful, inefficient methods of the past by old men, bent over their desks, quills in ink-stained hands, their visible decrepitude representing their outmoded skills and misery. The future, meanwhile, was be represented by smiling young women. 

The advent of the typewriter provided considerable advantages to the type compositor. A typed manuscript was much preferred (in fact, often insisted upon) not only because it was easier to read, but also because each character and word space produced on the typewriter is identical in its width. This made it a relatively easy task to calculate how many characters made up the copy (called casting off) page by page. From this it could be accurately estimated, using tables provided by the leading type foundries, how many pages the copy would require in any typeface in any size or weight. A number of specialist manuals were published which explained good practice for typists producing documents specifically for the printer. 

When phototypsetting was developed, this new technology remained, for the most part, within the print industry, and so a large number of Monotype and Linotype keyboard1 operatives transferred their skills and typographic knowledge to the new technology. However, when digital technology came on stream, it was typists who transferred their skills, working methods and the conventions of the typing manual from the typewriter to digital technology. Hence today, we have the aberration of texts shot through with holes. 

In the 1950s, the first quasi-typographic typewriters were manufactured to generate output for photolithographic printing (in place of paste-ups compiled from reproduction proofs which had been printed from inked metal type). These quasi-typographic typewriters included the Justowriter and the Varityper, each with a range of typeface designs at sizes between eight and twelve point. The sharpness of the typed image was considerably improved by means of plastic inking ribbons which replaced the textile ribbons. 

There appear to be two particular influences on the prescriptions given in typing manuals. First, naturally, is that of printing tradition. For example, the desire to keep the right-hand edge as straight as possible (ranged left setting was virtually unheard of until the 1920s, except when used for verse or playscript). And secondly, from school books and grammar books through the use of terminology, for example, ‘full stop’ for what the compositor would call a ‘full point’. 

Today, we still associate the distinctive appearance of a genuine typewritten document with important, often legally binding, documents. This lends it an authority that will, over time, continue to increase since the demise of the typewriter places such documents within a specific time frame. Meanwhile, the status of ‘typewriter fonts’ such as Courier, initially used to suggest economic efficiency, and, naturally, used by businesses associated with stationery and other office-related materials, has, since the establishment of DTP, been ‘down-graded’ by their association with a defunct technology. Consequently, today, Courier is more likely to be used to represent haste, informality and a sense of derogation.