Writer’s Workshop: Bond, Erasable Bond

Writer's Workshop 2 Minutes
Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

I learned how to type in my freshman year of high school, but was really never too good at it, because the typewriter I had lost its letter "K" at the beginning of sophomore year of high school, and we didn’t get it fixed until I had gotten an electric model when I started college. That was my fault: while I had told my mother that I had the K problem, I didn’t make enough of a stink about it. When it came time for Jim to write his term paper in junior year, Mom borrowed Grandma’s typewriter instead of fixing ours.

Anyway, I was a really awful typist because I hardly did any in high school, and this was a huge problem when I got to college. Even though I had an electric typewriter, I didn’t practice enough, and, being the procrastinator that I am, I wouldn’t start typing a paper until the night before it was due. A task that should have taken no more than a half hour (i.e. typing a 5-page paper) would take me a lot more than that, because I had to keep stopping and correcting errors.

I couldn’t find an efficient way to correct errors. Erasing left ghosts of the incorrect letters on the page, correction tape wasn’t much better, and Liquid Paper tended to go on a little too thick, plus the little bottle was a little too easy to knock over and create a huge mess. My electric typewriter was a Coronamatic, which kept the ribbon in a cartridge, and they came up with the idea of putting correction tape in a similar cartridge, so that, when I made a mistake, I could slide the ribbon cartridge out and slide the correction cartridge in. That way, I could spend countless minutes sliding cartridges in and out of the machine.

That was when someone told me about erasable bond paper. I could go back to using my eraser and wipe the mistakes out that way. Didn’t change the fact that I was making typos every two minutes, but for some reason I found it less stressful.

Still, I wish I had been born about ten years later, so that computers with word-processing software would have been available right when I needed them.

Published by John Holton

Internet disc jockey, lover of old TV (especially the commercials), inveterate wise guy.

Published

19 thoughts on “Writer’s Workshop: Bond, Erasable Bond”

  1. I am giving a young teenage writer a vintage underwood typewriter with no correction capabilities for typos. Can you suggest any erasable paper or correction tape that could work for her and are readily available? Thank you

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  3. Pingback: The Last Week of June 2022 Week That Was – The Sound of One Hand Typing

  4. Kids today will never appreciate the hoops we had to jump through to complete a typed term paper.
    I remember that my high school had IBM Selectrics for typing class, and there were TWO of them that had the in-line correcto tape. Get one of those, and you were really living!

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  5. I’m finally here and will work backwards. I actually visited every day but didn’t have time to comment. I’m at work and doing thisnon my small phone.
    The good ole days of the typewriter and the whiteout that would get all globbed up. I hated using the typewriter but had to in university.

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  6. Me too: “… I wish I had been born about ten years later, so that computers with word-processing software would have been available right when I needed them.” The amount of angst and trouble I went through with a typewriter and white-out and carbon paper… well, it was too much.

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  7. I learned to type in high school on a manual typewriter. I was thrilled when electric typewriters were invented and even more thrilled when keyboards were invented. Every job I’ve had from administrative work to an insurance underwriter required knowing how to type. I’m not as fast as I used to be but then I don’t need to be a speedy typist anymore.

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  8. Flashbacks! I learned to type freshman year as well but I didn’t listen and looked at my hands which apparently ruins everything. It was like magic the way some folks could type without a single mistake not even looking at the page as they went flying along.

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  9. Love the title! I made some nice change in college typing other people’s papers. But I agree about typos/corrections. It’s so much easier to let your thoughts flow when you can instantly correct mistakes!

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