Andrei's blog

MetaLearn: Shorthand

Index

Intro

Writing fast had always been a big deal. With every new technology, one of the first objectives was maximizing the writing speed.

Journalists are always the adopters. They have to write down speeches and testimonies in court. Right now keyboards allow extremely fast typing. The world record is at 300 wpm (Words per minute) but there is an endless list of specialized keyboards that enter sounds instead of letters and have potential for even higher speeds.

With audio recording, later video and now AI, the need for extremely fast note taking is dying off.

In short, shorthands have their letters replaced with one move curves and lines, the letters are connected like in cursive, but information and clarity is cut in favor of speed. The higher speed range can be compared to 10 finger keyboard typing speeds.

For shorthand there are plenty of guides and methods developed by different people for different languages. I will cover the most popular English ones.

General Resources

Note that most people create their own shorthand they find convenient, individual letter symbols are merged into 1 complex symbol that represents a common word. A lot of words are shortened making the text barely readable by anybody other than the author.

Pitman

Relatively old shorthand based on phonetics. It was used by journalists in 1860 to report political speeches during the American Civil War.

Now it might be slightly outdated. But you can find all books and resources in General Resources

Gregg

The most popular English shorthand, created half a century after Pitman. Supposedly hard to learn.

You can find all books and resources in General Resources

Teeline

Newest and easiest one to learn, all letters are substituted with a simpler version of them, and words are shortened (similar to abbreviations in texting) using simple rules.

I wanted to lean Teeline so here are resources I found:

Resources

Conclusion

There is a nearly endless amount of shorthand versions and methods created by different people, as groups of people endlessly arguing which is the best. If you are planning to invest in learning shorthand, I recommend to not waste to much time choosing, just try Teeline for 2 hours and go from there.

- very qualified shorthand expert