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!
Woah, you're so right: I live my dexter privilege without even thinking about it My apologies to any sinister folks out there.
And this reminds me to take let-handed single-handed operation into account when designing mobile UIs.
(Although you still have to pull the fountain pen -- I assume you're talking about the speed increase of writing continuously rather than printing each character).
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "have to pull the pen"; It's been some years since I last used a fountain pen, but there are basically two options when you're left-handed. One is to mirror your hand horizontally, and the other is to mirror in the plane of the nib (which is at 45 degrees to the rules on the paper). So your hand ends up above and to the left of the letter you're writing. I found that much more natural and easy to do, but it requires having blotting paper under your fist to avoid smudging everything.
(The third option is the Da Vinci one of mirroring your hand and the writing, but that's no use if you want other people to read it.)
So if your hand is to the left of the nib and the writing is going from left to right, I think that counts as "pushing"?
The third option is doable though if you write on paper that is thin enough to be seen on the other side - then just write on the back of the paper, reversed :)
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.
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
You pull it on the upward strokes too. Have you used a fountain pen for long periods of time? The nib acts as a spring (in fact it's called a "feder" in German, which coincidentally can mean "spring" though it also means "feather" which, of course, is the sense in which it is used) if you push on it. Little kids learn with a special kid's pen which has a very strong nib because they tend to push down hard and to push on the pen.
I don't know if they still require it, but as of 5 years ago my kid was still required to do his schoolwork with a fountain pen (until grade 8).
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.
I think the reason for this is as simple as when you see someone with pen and paper you don't have to wonder if they are actually browsing social media, talking on IM or doing anything else more interesting.
I pick between laptop and notepad based on what meeting I'm in / how I think they'd react. Close colleagues/friends I'll nearly always prefer a laptop. Clients I hardly know, never a laptop - even if I need a laptop out to show them a presentation or whatever, I'll still stick to notepad for notes.
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.)
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... 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/ with a slightly different take on the problem, where the objects you calculate with are continuous functions of x rather than pure numbers.
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.
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!
That only works if you can 1) write fast and 2) decipher what you wrote earlier. I'm fortunate enough to be able to meet both of of those characteristics, but I know one of my colleagues specifically learned LaTeX and emacs so that he could take notes quickly in math classes. LaTeX for equations, emacs drawing mode for ASCII art diagrams.
My first semester in college I discovered that I could not read my notes. With some effort, I fixed that.
40 years later, I can still read the notes, but I no longer understand them because they have no context (the professor's words). At the time the notes served to remind me of the lectures, but not anymore. I wish I had made audio recordings, but the idea never occurred to me, nor to anyone else.
The notes, no. The lectures themselves. For example, one of them was a Feynman guest lecture on potato chip worlds, which I'm sure if it was recorded it would be a classic today.
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.
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).
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!
Depending on what you mean by "anything technical", I seriously doubt that. Shorthand dominated the world of commerce and law for a long time, and it's not like they don't use a bunch of jargon too. Just come up with (or find someone elses invention of) the important abbreviations and you're all set.
A propely written shorthand note should be readable by other people. Journalists are in some countries required by law to keep their shorthand notes for a certain amount of time, so they can be used as evidence in court (and then obviously read by an uninterested third party.)
If you have to write really, really quickly, then yes, typing your notes up properly soon afterward is a good idea. If you aren't under any sort of time pressure and just casually note things down, you should be able to read it years or decades later.
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.
I really think there hasn't been enough experimentation with soft (and hard) keyboards - I saw a radial keyboard design for Android (I think it's like the SteamOS controller-keyboard) but I was told the app isn't available anymore.
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
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
The recommended way to use shorthand is still to take condensed, summary notes, like with longhand.
The difference is you're not missing anything being said while your write down the thing. It's a little like being able to type fast as a programmer: useful despite typing being only 5% of programming, because it lets you transfer your thoughts faster, so you can focus on the next thought sooner.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
I dont know about Gregg, but in Pitman shorthand, the position of the consonant's outline (as the symbol is called) relative to the line dictates its associated vowel. Above the the line is "ah", on the line is "eh", below is "ee", and so forth. You can adorn the whole outline with dots and/or dashes for vowel sounds on all consonant outlines, especially since its written cursively (ie a whole word is writtent together). However, in practice, you get what the word is from context and experience. My father who was a stenographer made me learn it when i was a kid and to this day I remember the outlines of words quite easily, even though I've never used it professionally.
Edit: A more appropriate question to the part of the article you referred to would be: How do you differentiate between "cot" and "got", for example, because it would be the same outline for c(ie k) and g. The official answer is that you wrote one thinner and the other thicker (which is possible when you use a pencil, which was what was used to write pitman shorthand, anyway). The practical answer is that you get it from context - not all sentences could have both those words equally viable.
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.
I don't know specifically about Gregg, but shorthand systems tend to have some sort of mechanism for disambiguating when confusion is possible (i.e. when both "bed" and "bud" works in the context, you might want to write out the vowel). Part of being a skilled shorthand user is in knowing instinctively when these confusions can arise and using the disambiguation mechanism.
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.
> 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.
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.
Before word processors, it was routine for people, possibly including teenagers, to learn it as vocational training for clerical positions, and it used to be essential for journalists. I was once interviewed by a shorthand-taking journalist about a decade ago.
And a 10% improvement is YUGE when you have to write everything by hand and there are no copiers!