
How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen - spne
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2014/06/yeah-i-still-use-shorthand-and-a-smartpen/373281/
======
sj4nz
While Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much use for anything
technical. Many of the shorthand idioms are based on the word-sound, not the
word-spelling, so it's okay if you're taking notes for yourself, reading
someone else's shorthand becomes an exercise in decoding the word in context
because you were not there for their experience during note-taking.

If you don't stay fresh with your own shorthand, just like your own source
code, you can find yourself re-reading your own work and wondering what you
were thinking!? That's kind of what this pen in the article semi-solves, by
having an audio recording synched with your shorthand.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
My understanding is that it was not generally expected that notes taken by one
person would be interpretable by another. This is what I've been told by my
mother, who learned and used Pitman shorthand. She says she never had to read
anyone else's notes, nor did anyone else ever have a need to read hers.

~~~
lelandbatey
This is largely why note taking is a two pass process for me. The first is the
pen and paper notes taken while speaking with someone else. The second is the
process of transcribing and editing those notes onto some digital medium. I
end up with a really nicely fleshed out document covering much more
information, much more thoroughly. For example, for a more complex point in a
discussion I may add an additional paragraph or two of background and context
to what was actually talked about.

I've found this process to be the best I've tried, and others who I share my
notes with have voiced their liking.

~~~
sj4nz
If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them, you
shouldn't even bother taking them. I don't think there are very many
exceptions for write-once-and-never-read notes. Note amplification is stronger
if your intent is to explain the notes to someone else.

~~~
emilga
> If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them,
> you shouldn't even bother taking them.

Beethoven would disagree with you,

    
    
        Beethoven left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks.
        Yet he himself said he never looked at a sketchbook
        when he actually wrote his compositions. When asked, "Why
        then, do you keep a sketchbook?" he is reported to
        answered, "If I don't write it down immediately I forget it
        right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and
        I never have to look it up again.
    

Source:
[http://books.google.no/books?id=1YN3kc31nqAC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA...](http://books.google.no/books?id=1YN3kc31nqAC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&source=bl&ots=w5G9bts1uF&sig=0E-DqVf_esnTLnCTwXaFN3FT1WI&hl=no&sa=X&ei=UIyxU_ikEMS_ygPey4F4&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage)

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Jill Price (the Woman who remembers everything)[0] also compulsively kept a
journal. What is it about the connection between writing instrument and human
brain that doesn't extend to QWERTY? Price also didn't refer back to her
journals from what I can tell.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Price](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Price)

~~~
desipenguin
This might be of some help :
[http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/writing-and-
re...](http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/writing-and-remembering-
why-we-remember-what-we-write.html)

------
vxNsr
I got so excited when he said that it really was possible to write at 100
words a minute but then he said that it's nearly impossible to actually learn
Gregg, I wonder if there's a website somewhere....

About the Livescribe: it's an okay pen but difficult to hold. and somewhat
awkward because of the camera at the tip, but it could depend on the way you
hold pens.

~~~
6d0debc071
The old manuals are on archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/1916GreggShorthandManual-5thVers...](https://archive.org/details/1916GreggShorthandManual-5thVersion1916)

~~~
shadowfox
Just want to add that there are other shorthands which are pretty solid (and
more easily available). For example, Pitmans: [http://www.long-live-pitmans-
shorthand.org.uk/](http://www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand.org.uk/)

~~~
danohuiginn
I'd advise against Pitmans, unless you plan to take it very seriously. Pitmans
is one of the more complicated forms of shorthand, and relies on
differentiating between hard and gentle lines.

I found Teeline, for instance, much easier to get going with.

------
Osmium
I wonder how difficult it'd be to write OCR-style software for Gregg. It'd
have to be more sophisticated; character recognition alone wouldn't be enough,
you'd have to do a bit of Markov modelling with most probable sentences/words
too. I guess it's so niche no one will ever do it, but it sounds like a fun
project.

~~~
err4nt
I used to have a palm pilot and I LOVED the 'graffiti' input mode with the
stylus. You had an alphabet of simplified shapes and it made it very easy to
enter something quickly without needing to ‘hunt and peck' on a miniature
keyboard for the shift key or using shift keys to change modes.

I wondered why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS this way. I don't
care about 'handwriting recognition' of my own writing, I want a more
efficient input method, even if I have to learn it and practice to be good at
it. I'm not content with tapping one button for each character I want to
record :S

~~~
xrjn
I think an excellent input method for mobiles is Swiftkey. It has incredible
accuracy, and it learns really fast as to what and how you type. Its
intelligence beat all other keyboards that I tried, and I'm able to peak at
over 60 WPM using SK with two fingers, and 40 WPM with 1 finger and flow.
However, it gets tricky as soon as you get sloppy or start writing technical
stuff, so I tend to stick with the traditional tapping method of input.

There is a little bit of a learning curve to get optimal speed, but once you
learn all the nuances and the shortcuts, it gets absolutely great. Typing long
and detailed text is now reasonable on a phone, and quickly replying to
something takes no time at all thanks to flow in my opinion.

~~~
eru
A friend of mine swears by Swiftkey, too. They seem to have taken a turn for
the evil on Android recently, though: still usable as ever, but bugging you
every once in a while to try out new themes, or asking for overly broad
permissions.

~~~
SwiftKeyCM
Hi there,

You can actually turn off notifications from the app by: 1) SK settings 2)
Advanced 3) Uncheck the box

SwiftKey has also stated they are working on performance updates in the next
release:
[http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-5-performance/](http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-5-performance/)

As far as the notification at the top of the screen this is a notification
provided by the Android OS and cannot be turned off or hidden.

Cheers,

Ryan Community Manager @ SwiftKey

------
muaddirac
I don't see the utility of shorthand anymore. If you're just taking short
notes, you don't need to write 225wpm...and if you've recorded everything,
then you can listen to the recording later and take notes or type up a
transcript verbatim.

It would seem better to learn a stenography system so you don't waste time
inputting actual text, which surely you would need to do anyway? (How is the
time the author saves writing in shorthand not negated by the time it takes
her to type it up afterwards?) I guess if you knew shorthand and steno, you
could do everything pretty quickly.

~~~
jonnathanson
There are specific professions in which it comes in handy. Journalism is one
of them. Every now and then, you'll encounter someone who is willing to go on
the record, but for whatever reason, doesn't feel comfortable being taped.
(And by "every now and then," I mean somewhat greater than half the time.) And
a lot of people are put off by the act of typing into a keyboard or tablet
while you're speaking to them, even if you're making eye contact all the
while.

I'd say any profession in which you're on the go and often have to take notes
by pen and paper, shorthand is a necessity. This is doubly true in my case, as
a partial disability in my right hand makes longform pen-writing a PITA.

~~~
doorhammer
I know a few people who maintain eye contact while typing, for instance, while
I'm running a meeting. Man, it always feels creepy to me.

Am I the only one that gets that feeling?

~~~
dhruvmittal
I do this pretty often, and people pretty much always complain. Less so people
my age (college-aged), but a lot of professors, TAs, and my parents all claim
that it's entirely too creepy. My parents have actually told me that they'd
prefer if I just looked at the screen the whole time.

But on the other hand, why would I look at what I'm typing? I already know
what it says- I hardly have to read it again. A good typist knows when they've
hit the wrong key and should be able to correct for it without having to read.

~~~
doorhammer
I wonder if college age folks are more likely to be okay with it or if they're
less likely to say something about it? Probably some combination of the two,
I'd guess

I usually type mostly looking at the screen and then glance up and make eye
contact or nod during pauses, to re-establish that I know the person is there
and I'm paying attention to them.

I don't think it's so much a practical thing as purely social. I don't think
there's anything inherently wrong with looking at a person while you type. It
just doesn't seem socially typical. It might be the normal thing to do at some
point, in which case I'll adapt. It just doesn't seem to be the case now. It'd
be interesting to do research on this, though ,and see if there's a
significantly different perception between age groups.

I'd guess that most folks on this board are pretty proficient touch typists,
and could look wherever they want while they're typing. Even if you're only
reasonably good at touch typing, you're probably not going to mangle the words
to the point where you can't run a spell check over it to fix most of your
mistakes.

I'll personally probably stick to mostly looking at the screen for now, since
it seems like more people are made uncomfortable by looking at them, than
looking at the screen, but it's interesting to think about where it might go.

------
bane
Shorthand systems also exist in other languages. I'm aware that there was
something called a "fast writing" system in Korea and a version of Pitman-
Graham in Japan.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#Modern_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#Modern_Japan)

------
ThrustVectoring
For programmers, I don't think shorthand is the right technology to learn -
stenographic typing has the same kind of advantages and speed, and directly
inputs to the computer.

Learning shorthand does make stenographic typing easier to learn (and vice-
versa), since it's the same sort of syllable-based contraction.

~~~
fsiefken
For a stenographic typing solution that can work on a pc check Plover:
[http://plover.stenoknight.com/](http://plover.stenoknight.com/)

~~~
NoahTheDuke
Here's the 2013 PyCon talk given by one of the Plover developers, Mirabai
Knight: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-
dB6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g)

------
jamesli
The shorthand is based on sounds, not spellings. So the difficulty is that the
brain has to translate spelling into sounds first, which is a great barrier to
overcome.

There is a similar fast writing system (速写）in Chinese. I tried to learn it for
a year while I was in high school, but gave it up eventually. Other than the
extra difficulties of logograms vs phonograms, another barrier is that one
need to translate the fast writings back to "normal" ones for easy reads
later. Many times it is so hard to tell what I actually scribbled down.

~~~
scrollaway
> So the difficulty is that the brain has to translate spelling into sounds
> first, which is a great barrier to overcome.

It doesn't look like it's meant to be used to copy written text, but to take
notes that have already been spoken, which is exactly the opposite to what
you're describing - When I speak and you take notes, you essentially turn
sounds into spelling.

------
fardoche
I remember finding a textbook on Gregg shorthand in my grandmother's attic
when I was 10 years old. It fascinated me (secret writing! esoteric
knowledge!) and I spent a few afternoons practicing and inventing my own
abbreviations, even using it to take notes in school once or twice, but my
family bought a home computer not long after that, and all my energy went into
learning BASIC.

------
malloreon
I was really hoping this article would end with the author revealing the
Livescribe pen could expand Gregg shorthand written with it into standard
characters on a computer.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It would have to be a author-guided OCR though as the same symbols can
represent different words.

~~~
eru
You can probably get pretty far with machine learning.

------
keithpeter
[http://www.nctj.com/journalism-qualifications/shorthand-
teel...](http://www.nctj.com/journalism-qualifications/shorthand-teeline)

UK journalists still do teeline shorthand. I used to have to help upload
practice dictations for a colleague who taught teeline.

Pitman's shorthand was the one used by secretaries when they took dictation. I
was fascinated my my Mum's shorthand books as a nipper.

------
jimbobimbo
This reminded me about my Pocket PC, which used to have a writing recognition
mode that was a cross between Palm's stokes and regular writing (I could've
been a 3rd-party keyboard). It was more accurate than regular writing
recognition that Pocket PC had and thus faster for me to use. To this day my
handwriting is altered by the way I was writing on that keyboard...

------
eggy
I have been using the Echo Livescribe pen for 4 years now, and it has saved me
on many occasions. I taught myself Quickscript before I ever had the pen, but
because of the lack of OCR for it on the pen, I don't really use it much.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript)

------
ChuckMcM
Loved the exposition on Gregg shorthand, I tried and failed to master it in
college sadly, but it also gave me new respect for the archivists who decipher
notes on the margins of older texts, as those seem to be in their own
shorthand, sometimes invented by the author of the margin note.

------
egypturnash
"As a journalist, I begin most interviews by..." ...talking about my cool pen
and Gregg Shorthand for a couple of minutes. Well that's a great way to spend
the possibly limited time your interviewee has to talk to you.

~~~
brandonbloom
When hand-held tape recorders were new, I'm sure many journalists opened with
"Have you ever seen one of these?" shortly before asking "Is it OK if I record
this conversation?". Seems like a perfectly reasonable 30 second exchange to
ensure that the interviewee is informed and comfortable.

------
sikhbeats
> Gregg eschews the parade of silent letters, like the “y” in “bay” that make
> English so difficult to learn as a second language.

I stopped reading here. I can't take this drivel seriously.

~~~
thrill
srsly?

~~~
BonsaiDen
At least for me - a native German speaker with English as a self taught second
language - I find that the `y` in bay actually makes it easier to figure out
the correct pronunciation.

Since `a` is pronounced as `ah` in German, just having `ba` would make the `a`
sound like the one in `bra`, which would make it hard to distinguish between
`ba(y)` and `ba(h)` when first learning the language.

Removing the y's would also leave one with seemingly strange words like `awa`,
`ga`, `sla` and `sta`. Which quite honestly to me, look much more like
mnemonics rather than actual English words.

~~~
jdewald
I thought that at first as well (about the potential confusion), but then
recalled that most of the "possible" alternatives aren't real English words:

"bah" is really only a sort of exclamation and the sound of a sheep, not
something you'd really have appear in an interview.

As you pointed out, "awa(h)", "ga(h)", "sla(h)" and "sta(h)" aren't English
words [1] that you'd confuse in context so "away", "gay", "slay" and "stay"
are the only possibility for them. The "y" really is not necessary.

I really want to learn Gregg now...

1 "gah" like "bah" ends up being an exclamation, and "slaw" as a food... but I
can't think of a case where it would be confused with "slay" in context.

EDIT: Clarification on gah, awa, etc

~~~
mkd1964
The 'a' sound in "Slaw" is a bit tricky. it rhymes somewhat with the 'o' sound
in 'ostrich', 'ought' or 'taught', which are written with the symbol for an
'o'. Oddly though, the word "Father" is written with an 'a'. If it's really
necessary to distinguish between these sounds, Gregg Shorthand does allow for
diacritical marks over vowels, but they are rarely used, since the meaning is
usually clear from the context (and they slow you down).

It may help to realize that John Robert Gregg was Irish - so imagine his
_somewhat_ British pronunciation of vowels. Since Gregg shorthand is written
phonetically, the words "father" and "farther" are written pretty much the
same . That becomes a bit confusing to an American speaker of English.

I taught myself shorthand in high school. I love foreign languages and found
it fascinating. A "Secret Language" like someone said above.

But I agree with one of the other posters, if you do not use it often, you
will find it very difficult to do well. The basics of Gregg shorthand are
incredibly simple, but it is another thing entirely to master - to be able to
write quickly and accurately takes practice. Still, it is not impossible and
you use it quite readily only knowing the basics. Unfortunately it has become
a lost art except to a very few.

It would be quite an undertaking to write OCR software for Gregg shorthand
because the writer has a lot of freedom to construct abbreviations on the spot
or join several small words together when convenient (rather like native
Germans can come up with compound words you won't find in a dictionary). The
other problem would be clarity. While Gregg Shorthand doesn't have rules like
Pittman for placing certain strokes on or above a line, proportion is quite
important because several letters share common shapes ("n and "m", "p and b",
"t and d", "f and v" are all quite similar but vary in length or height).

So the writer would have to be consistent in their proportions and the
software would need to be able to learn the writer's style.

