A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014)

Plus, you can even learn to spell huge with an h ...

.. if you're right handed.

You do push the pen. Otherwise how would you write an O? like ()? Similarly there are upward strokes in h, b, d, k, m, n, r...

I would say that cursive ("joined up handwriting" as I know it) prefers downward strokes, and I don't think it ever begins a letter with an upward stroke.

I think the reason for this is as simple as when you see someone with pen and paper you don't have to wonder if they are actually browsing social media, talking on IM or doing anything else more interesting.

I pick between laptop and notepad based on what meeting I'm in / how I think they'd react. Close colleagues/friends I'll nearly always prefer a laptop. Clients I hardly know, never a laptop - even if I need a laptop out to show them a presentation or whatever, I'll still stick to notepad for notes.

The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner.

(How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)

That's pretty cool. If one were inclined to take it to the next level of absurd awesomeness, one could employ machine learning:

  1. Feed all the examples from the Gregg dictionary into a neural network.
  2. Generate all the possible positionings for a word.
  3. Have the trained NN pick the best one.

That said, I think doing the opposite conversion, from Gregg to English, would be marginally more useful (and a lot harder, I assume).

Neat. I'm surprised to learn from your post that Unicode, which has space for everything, doesn't include shorthand.

This might interest you instead: http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm

Relies entirely on phonetic representations, so it can represent just about anything.

I really think there hasn't been enough experimentation with soft (and hard) keyboards - I saw a radial keyboard design for Android (I think it's like the SteamOS controller-keyboard) but I was told the app isn't available anymore.

Depending on what you mean by "anything technical", I seriously doubt that. Shorthand dominated the world of commerce and law for a long time, and it's not like they don't use a bunch of jargon too. Just come up with (or find someone elses invention of) the important abbreviations and you're all set.

A propely written shorthand note should be readable by other people. Journalists are in some countries required by law to keep their shorthand notes for a certain amount of time, so they can be used as evidence in court (and then obviously read by an uninterested third party.)

If you have to write really, really quickly, then yes, typing your notes up properly soon afterward is a good idea. If you aren't under any sort of time pressure and just casually note things down, you should be able to read it years or decades later.

"Now client is being a bitch."

Are you up to as-fast-as-Orthodox (en-Latn) for either reading or writing yet?

Erasmus thought that verbatim note taking hurt the memory and discouraged it.

The recommended way to use shorthand is still to take condensed, summary notes, like with longhand.

The difference is you're not missing anything being said while your write down the thing. It's a little like being able to type fast as a programmer: useful despite typing being only 5% of programming, because it lets you transfer your thoughts faster, so you can focus on the next thought sooner.

I do quite a few interviews and find that its easier to record exactly what was said mechanically because at another level, I'm also understanding and responding to it. This way, I keep a record of what happened for later without much thought to summarizing it at that time, and instead am able to take the conversation where i want it to. later, i look at the raw notes and re-visualize the conversation and THEN draw conclusions.

So yes, IMO, there's place for exact notes when you're both the scribe and active participant.

You will probably be interested in Plover, which is open-source and CrowdSupply-crowdfunded: http://www.openstenoproject.org/ http://plover.stenoknight.com/

It does lead to collisions, context is usually enough to disambiguate, or there are many specialized abbreviations. I never played with it long enough to get the details, though.

I don't know specifically about Gregg, but shorthand systems tend to have some sort of mechanism for disambiguating when confusion is possible (i.e. when both "bed" and "bud" works in the context, you might want to write out the vowel). Part of being a skilled shorthand user is in knowing instinctively when these confusions can arise and using the disambiguation mechanism.

I dont know about Gregg, but in Pitman shorthand, the position of the consonant's outline (as the symbol is called) relative to the line dictates its associated vowel. Above the the line is "ah", on the line is "eh", below is "ee", and so forth. You can adorn the whole outline with dots and/or dashes for vowel sounds on all consonant outlines, especially since its written cursively (ie a whole word is writtent together). However, in practice, you get what the word is from context and experience. My father who was a stenographer made me learn it when i was a kid and to this day I remember the outlines of words quite easily, even though I've never used it professionally.

Edit: A more appropriate question to the part of the article you referred to would be: How do you differentiate between "cot" and "got", for example, because it would be the same outline for c(ie k) and g. The official answer is that you wrote one thinner and the other thicker (which is possible when you use a pencil, which was what was used to write pitman shorthand, anyway). The practical answer is that you get it from context - not all sentences could have both those words equally viable.

Before word processors, it was routine for people, possibly including teenagers, to learn it as vocational training for clerical positions, and it used to be essential for journalists. I was once interviewed by a shorthand-taking journalist about a decade ago.

From the article:

> For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses. But Gregg’s decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg’s death. [...] The real death knell for Gregg, though, was the arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s. Even high-level executives no longer dictated letters to their secretaries; they wrote them themselves on their desktop computers. Companies that used to have scores of skilled shorthand writers eliminated their steno pools entirely.