An Ode to Writing in Courier

The Courier typeface is a reminder of typewriters and school and college reports clacked out in the distant past. This is what came out of my manual Remington and Royal, and later a business IBM Selectric.

With the IBM, you could switch out those fascinating typeballs, and replace it with something so completely new, like Helvetica, that the letters appeared to flutter and jive across the page. But Courier is the typeface of old school writing, and of drafts. When you type in Courier, no one—and I mean no one—expects this to be the final, finished document. You’d have to be crazy to print something out for official consumption in Courier font. The extra wide, uniformly spaced letters practically screams THIS IS A DRAFT. That is, it is the poorly heating, 1960 Volkswagen Beetle to the highly polished, 2021 Mercedes E-class font like Georgia Pro that brags, “I’m done, this is the best I got.”

Courier is the typeface of originals and of revisions. It is easy to read, easy to stick a cursor with older eyes to replace a word or move a sentence. If I need notes for a live meeting, I print them in Courier, because of their ease in reading. When editing with pen on paper, it is a breeze to make deletions or changes to these broad characters, molding unwieldy sentence structure and awkward phrasing into an unyielding river of cohesive thought.

As you may have guessed, the point of this post is not a fat font, serif or sans serif, bold or italic. Once ready to be published or posted, the work will be cut, pasted, and displayed in one of untold thousands of typefaces. Rather, the benefit gained through truly finishing your words—and the multiple rounds of editing and revision required to achieve this gleaming shine—may be noticed by not only the writer but appreciated by the intended audience. For people in the marketing business, this can be what sets them apart. Not the Garamond typeface or the eye-catching chevrons and other carefully chosen design devices. They help, but in the end, your words are the tools that will sell the message.

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