Shorthand
I’ve decided to learn shorthand. I’m going with a modified Gregg, Handywrite, that has more symbols to cover many vowel sounds and a couple consonant sounds missing from Gregg. It’s a phonetic system, not an alphabetic system, which means that there’s roughly one symbol per English phoneme (roughly, “sound”). Handywrite technically isn’t a shorthand, but a full phonemic writing system.
Basically, Handywrite is just a different way of writing normal text. It’s designed with the goal of speed—of having the simplest possible shape for each sound, and picked so that common sounds patterns are easy to write. I can only write about twenty or thirty words per minute with normal cursive writing, but with a shorthand system like Handywrite, I could get 80–100 words per minute, which is about the speed I type. This would make handwriting much more practical for me, making me able to comfortably take notes about things when I’m away from my computer, and much more easily take adequate notes in classes or meetings.
Shorthand systems look pretty wild written down. Here’s a sample, from the Handywrite page:
My handwriting is not that good. You may be surprised that the above images represent 24 words. They’re simpler than you’d expect based on the spelling of the word. I think part of it has to do with the spareness of the lines, and another part with all the extra letters that English uses to spell things that aren’t really needed. (One spelling reform proposal, Cut Spelng, achieves a much simpler spelling system solely by removing specific classes of redundancies and inconsistencies (with all other redundancies and inconsistencies being left in). Cut Spelng appears more spare and streamlined, like Gregg or Handywrite shorthand.
