words per minute
12
muddaserabbas
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The young man and the young woman looked even younger than their years as they left the offices of Country Properties, Limited, with a few "Orders to View" in their hands. They were indeed two young people, very much in love and recently married, and they were looking for a house. They had been married for just six months, and when they got married on that cold December day they had believed that they would soon find a place to let, and it did not seem necessary to wait for that happy day before setting up home together. So they had gone to olive with his mother, having only one room of their own and they had been very, very happy. It was an old house, however, with no modern changes. It was in a street lined on both sides with old houses just like it, and when April had come and the days grew longer the young married people all at once began to long for a little house of their own, with their own things in the rooms, and with a little land at the back and in the front where they could plant things and watch them grow. It did not seem very much to ask, yet it was something that was being asked by thousands of other young people. There seemed little enough hope of their being able to get such a place because all the small houses were for sale and not to let, and they had no capital.
Will the young man, was an engineer, and May, a beautiful young person with eyes so clear and true, had been a maid in a big boarding-house at the seaside before her marriage. Neither of them had had any opportunity to save money, and to buy even the smallest house it was necessary to have some capital to put down for the first payment. There had been times during that month of April when may thought that Will had lost interest in her. He sat so often deep in thought and without speaking. When she asked him what he was thinking about he would answer shortly: "Work." And then one day he told her the truth. The big engineering works where he spent his days had set a competition for their workers. The company desired to cut its operating costs and, being a forward-thinking undertaking, it believed that the workers themselves, who had to do the work, might probably be able to think of ways and means of improving methods. The first prize was to be &500 if the best suggestion people have to sell. The successful writer is not always the one who tells the best story but the one who can best use words to express his ideas and the feelings of his characters.
Nor are shorthand writers any less dependent upon words. Shorthand writers depend upon words for their very existence as shorthand writers, for without words there is no shorthand in the sense in which we understand it. Even the old picture writing was a form of shorthand, for one picture had to express quite a long story. The modern shorthand writer is like the successful story writer, the successful salesman, the successful man in political life: he depends for his success upon his knowledge of words, and the use he makes of his knowledge. The successful shorthand writer must understand and be able to use a very great number of words, and he must now the words used in a very wide field of subjects.
For the shorthand writer life is indeed a matter of "Words, words, words!"