Stenography

Shorthand is a writing method that can be done at speed because an abbreviated or symbolic form of language is used. It is commonly used by court stenographers. The word stenography comes from the Greek for "close writing".

Many forms of shorthand exist. The method was more popular in the past, when anything needing transcribing had to be written in real-time. This was a valuable skill to secretaries. Shorthand is basically a way of writing that represents common words, phrases and sentences in symbols or abbreviations that the writter can write faster, to allow people to write as fast as people speak.

One of the most widely known forms of shorthand is the Pitman method, developed by Isaac Pitman in 1837. Issac's brother Benn Pitman, who lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, was responsible for introducing the method to America. The method has been adapted for 15 languages. The system is phonetic as it is the word sounds that are written rather than the letters. For this reason, the system is sometimes known as phonography, meaning 'sound writing' in Greek. One of the reasons this method allows fast transcription is that vowel sounds are optional when only consonants are needed to determine a word.

Although Pitman's method was extremely popular at first (and is still commonly used) its popularity has been superseded by a method developed by John Robert Gregg in 1888. Gregg's system, like Pitman's, is phonetic, but has the advantage of being "light-line." While Pitman's system uses thick and thin strokes to distinguish related sounds, Gregg's uses only thin strokes and makes some of the same distinctions by the length of the stroke.

Pitman and Gregg are both examples of symbol shorthand systems, which are completely new written representations for English. There are between one and two dozen hybrid shorthand systems in the United States, such as Stenoscript, Stenospeed, and Forkner, which use both symbols and alphabetic characters, to one extent or another. There is one pure alphabetic shorthand system, originally called Briefhand, but, since 1965, known as Carl W. Salser & C. Theo Yerian (Personal Shorthand)

• Hamden L. Forkner (Forkner Shorthand)
• James Hill (Teeline Shorthand)
• Joe M. Pullis (Speedwriting)
• Robert Boyd (Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand)
• Thomas Jasper Caton (Caton Scientific Shorthand)

Dutton Speedwords is a method of shorthand that had the dual function of also being an international auxilary language.

See also

abbreviation, Captioned Telephone, closed captioning, court reporter, Gregg Shorthand, Pitman Shorthand, stenomask, stenotype, transcript, Shavian alphabet, Quickscript, Tironian notes

Reference

Pitmans College (1975). Shorthand. Hodder and Stoughton. (ISBN 0340056878)