Shorthand
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
She's the only person to date that I have met that knows shorthand. She has an insane amount of crazy stories.
When you’re saying something to them and they’re taking notes, it’s amazing how suddenly they’ll switch to shorthand even knowing that the notes are for you or for someone that doesn’t know it. Interesting at the doctors office or somewhere where we have to fill paperwork.
Interestingly, they have a hard time understanding each other’s sometimes. There’s some basics that are fine, but each one has adds their own bit of style I guess which makes it harder.
My moms signature is also weird. Her name has a g and she writes it weird because of something in shorthand. That g made faking her signature a pain. Then we learned teachers didn’t really notice.
First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it)
I currently can write about as fast as I type. Somewhere in the range of 40 - 80 WPM depending on how many complex words I need to use (those slow you down a lot more than common ones)
The biggest negative for me right now: reading. I can write it far faster than I can read it. For things like meeting notes,this pretty much rules shorthand out as I need to be able to flip through to find a particular meeting, or something important that someone said. This will get a lot easier with practice, but it's the biggest blocker for me at the moment.
I've made about 1000 flash cards in Anki for memorizing words, short forms, special rules, etc.
Very cool, but probably an obsolete technology in an era where recording is easy and typing is pretty good. I might feel differently as I improve, but that's how I feel now.
If I tried to transcribe my notes from every meeting, I would end up working on it for more time than the actual meeting took at this point.
I have thought about the exact same app actually. Being able to photograph my Gregg outlines and get an English transcription would be the dream.
Gregg and many other shorthands are purely phonetic. There's no difference between to, too, and two. You would need to do OCR on the outlines, map those to sounds, and map the sounds to possible words, then assemble a meaningful sentence based on what meanings make sense in context. A neural net could probably do a good job of mapping from outlines to possible words, and you could use NLP tools to try to choose a sentence from the possible outputs. It would be tricky to do well, for sure.
For now, it's vim for my meeting notes :)
You need something easy for a human to write and easy for a computer to decode.
I think Gregg is out for this reason, but so is graffiti (it's not fast enough right?).
I'm still early in learning, so I'm not sure how much it helps, but I've heard that regularly reading material written in Gregg that you don't know beforehand is the fastest way to increase your reading speed.
The poet George Bernard Shaw was famously irritated by English orthography, especially spelling, and pushed for reform. To that end he first invented a phonetic transcription of English which he called Shavian [1] and published book written in it as a fun demonstration [2].
Starting with Shavian, Kingsley Read then improved the alphabet into a more practical form called Quikscript [3], a little more cursive and designed for handwriting. I've used it for journalling and there's a few users out there [4] if you search.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet
2. https://www.amazon.com/Shaw-Alphabet-Androcles-Lion/dp/B0000...
Also, it is interesting to encounter an encyclopedia article explaining something that was, until recently, common enough that its existence and usage was part of general knowledge. A useful reminder of how things change.
That was indeed my point.
Seeing this Wikipedia link made me feel old.
Shorthand was indeed very common, my older sister took Pitman shorthand courses in high school, but by the time I hit high school in the mid 80s, it was no longer offered at my school. By the time the 90s rolled around, it was probably a dying craft. Heck, in the early 90s, I had a summer job using a dedicated Wang word processing machine, typing out paper memos using a dictaphone (remember those?).
As I get older, I find it interesting when younger generations find novelty in things from my younger days, like hollerith cards, walkmen, vinyl, and film cameras.
Then again, she was also the only person on campus who could get away reasonably safely with writing her passwords on Post-Its around her monitor.
There's also handywrite (http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm) which has the nice thing that the essence of it (not much different than gregg really) fits on an index card.
https://www.amazon.com/Teeline-Gold-Coursebook-Jean-Clarkson...
Another interesting one is Quickscript, technically not a shorthand but you can write quicker and it's phonetics based.
Yet another nice technique is using a specialized steno keyboard like Velotype keyboard (invented in my country)
So a well-designed modern shorthand could probably go over 200 words/min.
Modern" shorthand is really largely the same as shorthand as done in the early 20th century though. Gregg and Pitman are both phonetical, so there's really nothing particularly special about modern language that doesn't apply, other than that there may not be brief forms for words such as "cell phone" or "computer", but they could be created, though all it'd do if you don't is slow down your top speed. They're still not ultra-common words though.
[1] https://www.courtreporteredu.org/2015/08/some-federal-court-...