
A lesson in the lost technology of shorthand (2014) - kqr
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-i-still-use-shorthand-and-a-smartpen/373281/?single_page=true
======
gumby
Just a side point from the last line of this article: shorthand (and
"cursive") is specifically adapted to the fountain pen: the strokes are
continuous and drawn (i.e. you never push the pen, only pull it). Even with a
pencil or ball point/byro if you pull rather than push you end up with a much
more readable handwriting.

And a 10% improvement is _YUGE_ when you have to write everything by hand and
there are no copiers!

~~~
IshKebab
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.

~~~
Jill_the_Pill
We were taught to begin all cursive letters with an upward stroke, with even a
preceding tail on letters like a and o, as shown here --
[http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive-
writing/](http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive-writing/).

~~~
KateGladstone
That was a bad idea. Much better:
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, briem.net,
italic-handwriting.org, studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html,
BFHhandwriting.com, handwritingsuccess.com, Lexercise.com,
HandwritingThatWorks.com, freehandwriting.net/educational.html

~~~
DanBC
Briem has been criticised for creating "zig zag" handwriting that's hard to
read if the writer writes at speed.

And you need to include the [http://](http://) if you want those to be links.

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-
WRITING.1.pdf)

[http://briem.net](http://briem.net)

[http://italic-handwriting.org](http://italic-handwriting.org)

[http://studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html](http://studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html)

[http://BFHhandwriting.com](http://BFHhandwriting.com)

[http://handwritingsuccess.com](http://handwritingsuccess.com)

[http://Lexercise.com](http://Lexercise.com)

[http://HandwritingThatWorks.com](http://HandwritingThatWorks.com)

[http://freehandwriting.net/educational.html](http://freehandwriting.net/educational.html)

------
jonnathanson
Shorthand is a fantastic skill to learn, and I really need to learn it.

People get annoyed when you are taking notes on a laptop in meetings. It's
just a human psychology thing. You seem otherwise engaged. Even if you're
fully engaged in the conversation. There's just some hardwired human aversion
to believing you're paying attention when you're pecking away.

So being able to attend meetings the old fashioned way, with a pen and paper,
is a really good tactic. Bonus: it actually stands out now, and in a good way.
You come across as more serious and diligent for whatever reason.

~~~
WalterBright
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.)

~~~
kragen
This is a fascinating challenge. I feel like it's probably possible to enter
and edit equations as easily with the keyboard as with a pen; certainly you
can do so for numerical expressions, using RPN.

I wrote a quick hack at [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-
edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1...](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-
edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1_1_292_/_+_/_+_/_+_/_+) that almost does a reasonable job;
I think that, although it doesn't quite reach being a usable equation editor,
among other things because it doesn't have "=", it shows that one is
possible.)

I wrote another related quick hack at
[http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/)
with a slightly different take on the problem, where the objects you calculate
with are continuous functions of _x_ rather than pure numbers.

~~~
WalterBright
I defy anyone to reproduce a chalkboard full of eqvations, diagrams, arrows,
etc., with a laptop and keep up with the professor.

Besides, my spiral notebook's battery never gives out, it's light, it's $.79,
nobody is going to steal it, it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't distract
anyone behind me, it won't break when I drop it, etc. Besides, no notes are
complete unless you have a coffee cup ring on it.

Disco is music's greatest achievement, too.

~~~
kragen
You raise some good points, and many of them are related to why I take most of
my own notes on paper. However, laptops far excel spiral notebooks at their
ability to produce coffee rings on your notes; with the latest algorithms, you
can produce many such rings per second!

------
luckyt
Some time ago I wrote an English -> Gregg Shorthand converter:
[https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/an-
introduction...](https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/an-introduction-
to-gregg-shorthand-and-an-attempted-english-to-shorthand-converter/)

It's not very good, but I'd like to see if anyone can make a better one. It's
a shame that shorthand is lost to time and mostly replaced by technology like
audio recorders.

~~~
scribu
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).

------
tfm
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7961385)

Top comment starts "While Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much
use for anything technical", which was a timely intervention to stop me
running off and implementing a drop-in replacement for the Android keyboard!

~~~
falcolas
This might interest you instead:
[http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm](http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm)

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

~~~
PepeGomez
You mean just about anything as long as it's in English.

~~~
adiabatty
If you want a fully generalizable script, use IPA; if you want something
designed to be fast for a particular language, use a method designed for that
language. Quikscript is great for mid-century Received Pronunciation, but if
you want something that's fast for Spanish, you'll likely want to change
things a bit.

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

~~~
Shorel
I don't find the Spanish version of Gregg shorthand too different from what I
saw for English.

[http://zonaforo.meristation.com/topic/2185985/](http://zonaforo.meristation.com/topic/2185985/)

------
pattisapu
One of the main reasons I write in Gregg is that I can take critical notes
during meetings that I'd rather nobody else be able to read.

~~~
kqr
"Now client is being a bitch."

~~~
pattisapu
Heheh, close enough. ;-)

------
panglott
A couple years ago, I learned to read/write Quikscript, which was indirectly
inspired by shorthand systems (George Bernard Shaw knew phoneticist Henry
Sweet and Pitman shorthand, and endowed an effort at script reform in his
will).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript)

It's harder than you might think to read English in a different script; we
have learned through great effort how to read and write the conventional
orthography. Writing—and especially deciphering the writing—is laborious and
slow without a lot, a lot, of practice. Plus, writing phonemically made my
spelling worse ;)

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

~~~
panglott
No, I don't actually handwrite things frequently, and didn't get much
practice. More trouble than it was worth, for keeping notes and stuff in.
Maybe I'll pick it up again.

------
jmcphers
How often do you need to write down _exactly_ what was said?

Studies[0] show that when students use laptops to take notes, they remember
less than when they use a pen and paper. The suggested mechanism by the latter
improves retention is that it forces you to understand and summarize the
content due to limited output speed (thereby processing it more deeply); when
you are able to produce output at near the speed of input you can simply
transfer words with little processing. It seems likely that this would be a
shortcoming of shorthand as well as laptops. If you're taking notes in a
meeting for your own use, it seems as though "longhand" may actually be the
better choice (excepting of course those situations in which it's important to
know exactly which words were said).

[0]
[http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/095679761452...](http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581.abstract)

~~~
vinodkd
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.

------
Pitarou
I once spent a bit of time learning Teeline Shorthand. Teeline is the form of
shorthand that British journalists are expected to learn. It's easier to
learn, but less efficient, than Gregg or Pitman.

But I reached the conclusion that there was little to be gained from it.
Keyboards are so much faster that the only real advantage to using shorthand
is obfuscation.

------
fsiefken
You could 'roll your own' with Dutton Speedwords and some selfchosen
vocabulary, it also works with plain alphanumeric keyboard entry. If you realy
want to enter text query Plover stenotype on youtube or our fav search engine

------
anexprogrammer
The article misses out the rather fascinating battle between Pitman, Gregg and
then new Stenography that was going on in the 1910s. The stenographers
competed in all those speed competitions until they comprehensively won one of
the early ones. This was so disruptive that the competition paused for some
years and when it came back was pen system only.

Pitman / Gregg gave rise to outrageous claims on both sides and religious
discussions much like "Windows or Mac".

Given the bandwidth possible I've wondered why no one has tried a stenotype
like keyboard on a computer.

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

------
Animats
You can still get Gregg standard steno books.[1][2] They're sized for lap use,
not for use on a desk.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Steno-Books-Inches-
Sheets/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Steno-Books-Inches-
Sheets/dp/B004ZKXM0Q) [2] [http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/945722/TOPS-
Steno-Book...](http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/945722/TOPS-Steno-
Books-6-x-9/)

------
taco_emoji
> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced
> consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as
> “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”.

Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud
in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always
good enough to help the reader discriminate.

~~~
mcguire
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.

~~~
linhchi
So it's like chinese. One word can have several meaning depending on context.
And they seem to be able to figure it out.

------
personjerry
Did shorthand used to be more popular? I remember reading in The Westing Game
as a child unfamiliar with English, and had to infer the meaning of the word.
The book seemed to assume that its readers (mainly teens) knew the word.

~~~
egypturnash
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.

~~~
rmc
Another theory for the decline was the it was mostly women, and smart women,
who were working as shorthand writers. As women's lib progressed, those women
had much better job oppertunities, and left the field.

------
pinoceros
Should include 2014 in the title.

