Clickable dictation at various speeds is available at the bottom of this page. The transcript of the dictation appears here as well.
Of course these letters are dated today but they're still good dictation practice. (Next month, it's even MORE outdated!)
For those who think I sound funny again this month like last, remember that it's still allergy season.
Dictation pieces must be a minimum of three minutes to be a valid test. Anything under three minutes is therefore not acceptable for testing purposes. Keep in mind that before Diamond Jubilee Gregg, all shorthand tests were five minutes. If you go back far enough, tests were ten minutes or longer.
200 Takes for Building Shorthand Speed, Zoubek, 1946, Letter 108
Dear Sir: A few years ago, Mr. Frank Stone of the Stone Manufacturing Company, consulted the “Nelson’s Book of Letters” before he wrote a sales letter to be sent to a list of prospects. From that one sales letter, Frank Stone received over $600,000 in orders. It was unbelievable, yet 90,000 of the letters were returned to him with orders averaging $7.50 each. When Mr. Stone saw these orders pouring in, he wrote us the following letter: “I would not have believed it possible if I had not seen it myself. In the next few years, we sent three similar letters, and they brought in an even bigger return.
When a man can sell, entirely with letters, $3,000,000 worth of traveling bags and dispose of them at a profit, when he can increase his gross sales from $2,000,000 a year to $6,000,000 a year, then there must be something sound about his way of writing and using letters. Wouldn’t it pay you to investigate and see if you couldn’t apply a similar method in selling your product? If you could get Mr. Stone to show you his most successful letters, if you could induce him to point out the features that make them pull so much better than others, no reasonable price would be too high for his services, would it?
Well, that’s exactly what we do in “Nelson’s Book of Letters.” We give you many successful letters and tell you how they can be applied to you.
If you were to approach Mr. Nelson, the author of the book, and ask him to write a letter especially for you, he would charge you $100. Yet in this book, he gives you a hundred of his most successful letters and shows you how you can use the same appeals for your own letters.
Mr. Nelson has been selling by mail for more than twenty years. In that time, he has sold more than $20,000,000 worth of goods. He has sold books, coal, dresses, and many other products—all by mail.
Now he has put all his experiences into one big book, so interestingly written that many people have written us they read his book as they would read a volume of fiction.
The first and second editions did not last long. There are still a few copies left of the third edition; if you act quickly, you can have one.
Return the enclosed card, without money, and we will mail one of the remaining copies to you at once. Look the book over for one week; read the successful letters in it. Then adapt one or two of them to your own product. Then, and only then, decide whether you want to keep the book. If you feel, as we do, that the hundreds of successful letters in it are worth the price of the book a dozen times over, send us $4 in full payment. Otherwise, return the book and you will owe us nothing. Yours very truly,
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