How?

A post from red­cub caused me to won­der about something.

Back in the dark ages, I took a high school typ­ing class. It was, in fact, the only class that my par­ents ever absolute­ly required me to take.¹They actu­al­ly demand­ed a year. After one quar­ter, the kind teacher explained that I was already well over 80 wpm and had all the forms down, so two more quar­ters would be a waste of my time.

For­mat­ting var­i­ous doc­u­ments was part of the class. Block style, mod­i­fied block, indent­ed, etc. Of course, we also did envelopes²I’d still rather use a type­writer than a word proces­sor and print­er for envelopes, but it isn’t prac­ti­cal to keep a type­writer around sole­ly for that pur­pose. I lust after a ded­i­cat­ed label print­er, but can’t jus­ti­fy the pur­chase. and memos. 

Now that typ­ing class­es prob­a­bly aren’t even taught, and most peo­ple I know learn “key­board­ing” by using com­put­ers from an ear­ly age, how do they learn those things? Osmosis?

I’ve run into lots of pro­fes­sion­als who can’t for­mat let­ters or mem­os, much less envelopes, with­out using Word tem­plates. I sup­pose they planned on hav­ing sec­re­taries, but of course, very few peo­ple rate admin­is­tra­tive sup­port staff in most orga­ni­za­tions these days.