11–20 of 68 posts
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…
Previous discussion: 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!
This might interest you instead: http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm Relies entirely on phonetic representations, so it can represent just about anything.
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.
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…
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.
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, wi…
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.
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…
.. if you're right handed.
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).
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.
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…
Plus, you can even learn to spell huge with an h ...