

Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand? - crux

The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down—even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.<p>For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting—I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.<p>But as these things go—informed by a personal interest in historical text systems—I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures—some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.<p>Partly this is an exercise in efficiency—my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English—but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.<p>So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible.
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jayphelps
I think for me it would be much like the Dvorak keyboard layout: It would save
me so much time and I would love it, but I just can't unlearn something so
deeply ingraved into me. I've tried, but it just turned out to be counter
productive cause of the time spent relearning = time could have just typed the
damn thing in QWERTY.

Btw, I was hoping this article was about ternary operator shorthand. (e.g.
result = a > b ? x : y;) In that case I would have said HELL YES.

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crux
The one advantage that my system has is that it's a little more like Colemak
than Dvorak—to drop the metaphor, my system basically takes a standard line of
plain text and does a lot of character substitution. So not only is any line
of my system's (got to think of a better name) text non-lossy with a single
unambiguous line of Roman alphabet text, but you can basically learn it as you
go: writing everything down normally and replacing characters and clusters as
you learn those new glyphs. You don't have to start from scratch like in
Dvorak, or like in all those nutty swoopy shorthand systems of yore.

~~~
jayphelps
Well to answer your question more directly, I'm 100% sure there are plenty of
people who would enjoy you documenting it. Even if I didn't use it, I'd read
it. Never underestimate our geekiness! I'm sure I'm not the only one who surfs
Wikipedia several hours a day learning the most random shit.

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kgo
I briefly thought about learning real shorthand because I couldn't write fast
enough. Never really followed through on it. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd probably
stick with a standardized version instead of yours. I imagine most other
people would be the same, unless you could convince them your system is
significantly faster or easier to learn.

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dgroves
+1 very interested in reading about it.

