r/shorthand

I'm creating a beginners shorthand workbook. DM if you qualify and your interested :)

My grandfather wrote a diary entry in Pitman shorthand every day from 1922 until his death in 1978. Early this year I created two posts asking for advice about transcribing them.

Thanks to the helpful folks here, today I'm celebrating finishing the New Course. I'm nowhere near an expert, but I'm no longer a beginner. In particular I'd like to thank /u/BerylPratt for her advice and Pitman website.

Here are 20 thoughts / observations about my shorthand journey over the last six months.

1. My first reaction to seeing my Granddad's diaries was awe and confusion. How could a kind, quiet old man write whole books of miniature alien graffiti? It looked like the handwriting of a madman. There seemed to be no personal style, or consistency. It was all different size, weight, upright vs slanted, on or off the line, loopy vs angular, big vs small gaps.

2. Learning Pitman was a continual process of having the rug gently pulled out from under me. It's hard to know what you don't know. You are given more and more tools, but it's not clear what the right tool is until you know all of them. For example, you're introduced to the S outline, then a month later you realise you mostly use circles, not S. You get used to reading the SH R curve.. then two months later you're told it's often an F sound, with no vowel before it.

3. Yet, after a few months I started seeing Pitman everywhere. My head started translating shorthand in logos, graffiti, my kids' Lego. I found myself "reading" twigs lying on the ground.

4. I got through it because I enjoyed the process. For all of Pitman's steep learning curve, the New Course was a wonderfully slow and steady way to learn. It was challenging, but never infuriating. There's a little dopamine kick when you figure out the answer to an exercise without looking it up, and I kept coming back for that. It was like a daily crossword puzzle.

5. The biggest brain melt was the halving principle. By making a stroke half the size you add a D or T. There's something deeply odd about creating sounds by using less pencil. Imagine in English spelling if you could make a sound by removing a letter already in a word? Some long words are scrunched up little outlines, packed with detail, while some short words are big and clear. I'm glad it was introduced early.

6. Another brain melt: adding a plain -ed can completely change an outline. Despite all the rules, often there are many ways to write an outline and the correct one is a matter of convention.

7. I am ok at reading, but I'm still slow at writing. I wrote out both reading and writing exercises, but I enjoyed the writing exercises less. It was hard to know if I had the right answer. It could also be a motivation thing. My aim was to learn to read Pitman, not write it.

8. So many things that seemed bonkers at first were actually not too bad. Like: heavy and light strokes, distance from the line to indicate vowels, big and small loops, big and small gaps between outlines, and 30 degree W vs 60 degree CH.

9. Pitman may be hard to learn, but let's talk about regular English. As my 6yo knows, learning to read and write English is hard. It takes *years* to even get ok at it. The spelling is mad. I really empathized with my daughter, who is going through it. When you're tired and you see a page of confusing symbols, sometimes you just want to guess.

10. It's normal for kids to mix up b and d when learning to read. I feel Pitman has a hundred of these. It seems like every squiggle has a mirror image squiggle which means something quite different. It makes me wonder if there are clever shorthand "palindromes", where you turn the page upside down, or look at in a mirror, and get another entirely sensible sentence.

11. Setting expectations was important. I'm glad that early on I convinced myself that I needed the full course. Someone here said it would be at least three months. It helped finding an outline on a pre-transcribed diary page and skipping forward to find that definition. For me it was the outline for "rather". It's just a long straight line, but it wouldn't be introduced until the course was almost finished.

12. It's amazing the resistance my brain had to learning some outlines. L curves up and to the right, a little like a lowercase R. One part of my brain would insist for months that Ls were Rs, and another part of my brain would be constantly (and exhaustingly) correcting it.

13. When I started I didn't realize how beautiful shorthand could be. In a well-written outline every pen stroke is both necessary and sufficient - something you can never say about even the neatest longhand handwriting.

14. I found the process of reading actual diaries quite different to exercises. Strokes are smudged, slanted, squished, missing. It's harder to logic through it. You rely on muscle memory, and a "feel" that a shape looks familiar. That's probably where all the practice comes in. It's about internalizing the rules.

15. The biggest thrill has been when I first see a name of a relative emerging from the squiggles. Two months in I saw my parents, my brother and my sister appear in a 1978 diary. My granny and my uncles showed up a bit later, then a great uncle, and my dad's cousins. When this happens it suddenly stops being an exercise and becomes a living, human thing.

16. My Granddad mostly wrote well. He added lots of vowel markings, which is great. Some of his milder crimes include slanting to the right (TH can look like V), slanting up (M can look like L), missing dots for -ing and con-, and hard and soft lines being hard to tell apart. Also, the diaries are tiny, some about the size of the palm of your hand. As an older man with bad eyesight I don't know how he wrote them.

17. On the best days I can translate 95% of the words. On bad days it's still 75%. Half of every day is really mundane stuff, like the weather. Yet every day has at least one minor surprise. He doesn't give many opinions or private thoughts, and he shares little nostalgia for the past or hopes/fears for the future. The diaries are mostly him observing life as it passes, with a good eye for detail and a nice turn of phrase.

18. I've only tried twenty diary entries so far. My favourite is the day after my uncle's 21st birthday party in 1956. "<uncle> and <uncle> were at home. They helped <granny> to clear up the tremendous mess left after last night's party. There were dishes to be washed of gargantuan proportions. <granny> went to bed in the afternoon for a few hours at <uncle>'s direction! I am feeling a bit drowsy after yesterday's <unreadable>".

19. Where do I go from here? My aunt who passed away ten years ago transcribed maybe 5,000 diary entries. I plan to get stuck into transcribing diaries, using those my aunt has already transcribed as reading exercises. Ultimately I just need to know how one person wrote Pitman.

20. However, there are still 15,000 to go - a colossal amount of work. I'm fascinated by any tools or technology to help automate this, now that I understand the problem. I know that at some point I will get bored. My aunt got so sick of transcribing the weather she started just skipping it. So maybe the most important thing is to consolidate my knowledge, so I know I can take a break for a year or two without too much revision.

https://preview.redd.it/qz989p2d3xah1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c4505db5c91ded680b1f276fb9823c0830371c8

would this be the correct way to write tofu in the gregg shorthand alphabet?

Hey all,

I keep my notes in a 5mm dot grid notebook with a 100 micron felt pen, and I'm taking an interest in Gregg. Unsure whether I'm going to commit to it, but I'm definitely interested, we'll see if it sticks.

That's to say - I've written my first few shorthand symbols like an hour ago.

I have some concerns, wanted to see if the people who actually know Gregg think they're legitimate: Namely, if I want to write within the 5mm boxes (allowing a small clearance, as I would for 'g' or 'q'), I'm worried that certain words would just not be feasible unless I drew all individual symbols so small that I wouldn't even be able to tell similar symbols apart for the tiny margin of error.

Just as an example with some nonsense word just to get my point across: Consider 'maj' as in 'magic': the circle for a needs to be taller than the circle for e, and the more-vertical-than-horizontal line for 'j' needs to be taller than the one for 'ch'... So you wind up with a tall circle and a tall almost vertical line coming out of the top...

Basically: Does anyone with more experience think writing in Gregg in 5mm is practical, or am I looking more at using 2 dot grid rows per line of text?

I’m finding it harder to find the answers to my questions as my shorthand gets more advanced, hoping someone can help me out 😊

1. Is it ok to omit the word “in” for high speed dictation? I’m finding that it’s often not needed eg “he lives in France”, “they were in agreement”, “let’s study that in more detail”. Would it be ok to omit in cases such as these or am I storing up problems for later?

2. Very specific one - could short forms “and go through” all be joined together, if the reversed form of through is used? Or is there any reason not to do this?

Thank you! 🙏

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. Moby Dick - Herman Melville — QOTW 2026W27 Jun 29-Jul 5

Hey guys, I really want to learn some shorthand (mostly for fun, and to flex) and my choice fell onto Orthic shorthand (https://orthic.shorthand.fun/manual). I think it's really pretty, and it feels pretty great to write with since it's so flow-ey. However, I am kind of used to having resources for practicing handed to me by my school, but for Orthic it's hard to find some kind of PDF of guide for how to go about actually learning it. There is a lot about the system, but the system itself is kind of easy to grasp, the difficulty is in actually getting the muscle memory in.
For the last couple of days I've been just writing out words and sentences with Orthic, but I wanted to ask around whether some of you have like, resources for more directed practice?

I am pretty new to this whole thing, so I'd appreciate a bit of guidance :3

I'm curious. I'm trying to learn forkner but still pretty stuck on where to start. I initially checked the resources and stumble upon the guide textbook. I don't really know if that's the way most people would learn it, but I'm stuck with it for now :(

+ As a visual learner, I would much rather prefer a video tutorial, but the guide textbook is completely fine for me :)

(Which flair should I use)