Clickable dictation at various speeds is available at the bottom of this page. The transcript of the dictation appears here as well.
Times have changed! That last letter would never fly today. Someone would be in HR filing a case so fast and he or she would win huge damages. It's surprising how we think little has changed in the last 40 years and then we hit upon something like this last letter. These days, I believe most places value their older workers for their expertise. Just this morning--literally!--I reminded my colleagues as to how we used to handle international hires who had not yet received their Social Security card. . . .
Shorterhand Skills for the Future, Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1974, p 115-116, 121, and 127
Speed Building Practice
Dear Parent: We have adopted a plan in our school to increase the number of subjects we offer so as to take care of the large number of people who are now interested in becoming capable of holding jobs in the fields in which we give instructions. We are surprised at this remarkable increase in the number of people who wish to come to our school because we had expected a decline in some subjects due to the fact that we felt business had been slow in these lines.
We shall, of course, do our very best to take care of everyone who wishes to come to our school, although it will mean that we shall have to add many special classes. Respectfully yours,
Gentlemen: We agree with you that it is an important problem to have the public understand why it is difficult to give a particular date and time for deliveries of orders.
In our opinion, it would be best for you to set up a regular plan for making deliveries in each part of the city. There could be deliveries every other day during the week. This would be better than yards and yards of advertising copy because it would speak for itself. The public would soon become familiar with the idea of seeing your delivery trucks on the same day each week and, in this way, they would not have to worry about not being at home when a delivery is made. Yours truly,
Dear Sir: We believe that you will remember that we wrote to you recently about getting some younger men to increase the efficiency of our office staff. We have had altogether too many delays in getting out the work and we felt that this was due to the influence of the older members of our staff who usually cannot work quickly for long periods of time.
We would greatly appreciate any information you may have about the problem, together with the names of any people who would be qualified to give us some help in the matter. Very truly yours,
Instructions for Self-Dictation Practice:
Copy and paste the above article into a word-processing document, using double or triple spacing and 12- or 14-pitch type.
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Dictation Practice:
Note that the material was counted and recorded for dictation at 100; all other speeds were copied from the 100 take and electronically adjusted and may therefore sound unusual.
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