We return now to the attribute of succinctness and its particular revelance to writing for the ear.

Which, of course, leads to the subject of the manual typewriter. What brought this to mind was an NPR report this week that the company in India believed to be the last to manufacture this Industrial Age relic will end production.

It is a bittersweet occasion for me. Without the typewriter I might never have written for the ear or anything else. It helped me take the jumble of thoughts in my head and organize them on paper. Had I been left with my struggling longhand, I would never have gotten it done. For me, the root of "cursive" is "curse."

Even with the typewriter, though, it was hard work. I went through high school and college using my mother's 1930 Royal. I nearly had to stand up in order to hit the keys hard enough before the letters would show up on the page. Once I'd achieved a clean copy, any further edits had to be of life-or-death importance before I'd even think of retyping it.

With the advent of word processing and the evolving computer the life of a writer became better and so did the writing. Now you could convert that jumble of thoughts into clean copy on the first draft. More importantly, you could fine tune it right up until deadline.

This is especially critical when writing for the ear, where the smallest change -- saving a word or even a syllable, simplifying a verb, a modifier -- can make a big difference.

I'll admit there was one thing you could do much better with a manual typewriter: vent! So you pound out a lede, read it and don't like it? Rrrrrippppppp it out of the cylinder, ball it up and toss it into the wastebasket.

Somehow, pressing delete isn't nearly as cathartic. But any time I really miss the manual typewriter I'll find one in a museum.