The comment:  "The longer I write shorthand, the LONGER I write shorthand" is a bit decieving.  This man was a practicing court reporter and could write at very fast speeds.  The theory this man wrote is VERY abbreviated.  I have a copy of the "Gregg Shorthand Reporting Course" and based on the work you do reviewing the theory (they have you go through the manual SEVERAL times), they stress penmanship drills and much practice, they also use "Gregg Reporting Shortcuts" for practice of very advanced phrasing principles.  After a certain point in the book, I am unable to read some of the shorthand.  Although they are advanced, the principles are generally in harmony with the basic theory of Gregg Shorthand.  There happens to be a lot more modification of word forms (in phrases, "company" is represented by "k").  His statement is not necessarily an endorsement of doing away with much of the memory load of brief forms, etc.  Brief forms represent much of the general, running vocabulary.    Yes, you should be able to construct an outline for an unfamiliar word based on the principles of the system, but it is necessary that you use briefs, phrases, and shortcuts — but they need to be learned COMPLETELY.  They must be automatic.  If you were to review his notes, I would imagine you would find a large number of the reporting briefs and phrases — he did not come to the point that he wrote EVERYTHING out.    What the writing is trying to enforce is that you must know your system completely and have brief forms at your fingertips without having to think of them.  They must be an automatic response.   "The word carrying faculty" is another skill entirely.  Unfortunately, I'm unable to carry more than a sentence in my head during the dictation.  I have always had to keep right up on the heels of the dictator.  It is a skill that needs nearly as much practice as shorthand theory.  It's a skill I wish I had.  🙂

I suppose every stenographer has their own method of writing while under the rigors of speed.  I caution you against repeating what you hear and then writing.  That is impeding your speed gain by light years.  It's like reading while moving your lips.  It slows you down.    As for writing the first letter of the word and hoping you can later work from that is risky.  Especially the vocabulary is unusual for you.  It's a better idea to write the first few sounds or syllables.  I don't know what your current speed is — but for my own part, I had decent speed when I graduated high school (120).  In college I got up to 140.  At that time I was using shorthand every day.  I was working in court and recording the minutes.  I wasn't the court reporter — I just took certain parts of the hearing verbatim (findings of the court, motions by counsel, avowals, stipulations, the judge's rulings from the bench).  I took minutes like meeting minutes.  I also tended the exhibits (which the reporters do in a number of jurisdictions).    The woman who was my primary trainer was an exceptional stenorapher.  When my notes had been blown to bits, her notes were as readable as a text book.  Late one night, at the conclusion of a very long hearing on some sort of preliminary injunction, the judge ruled from the bench.  The next day, when transcribing the hearing, she came across an abbreviation she had used for a phrase "ii" — and not for love nor money could she interpret what those two letters were.  Even though it was clear to her at the time of the taking, once the notes got cold, she couldn't recall.  Upon checking with the reporter at the hearing, it turns out that the phrase was "irreparable injury."   I wish I had managed to keep finding jobs that utlized my shorthand.  Although I am a legal secretary, I use shorthand very rarely for the purpose it was intended.  All of my writing now is done in practice session and not on the job.  Needless to say, my speed has declined.  With my renewed practice, I'm finding that I'm starting to get my groove back.    Reading lots of well written shorthand cannot be overstressed.  Your writing speed can be tied to your reading speed.  Usually, you can write at half your reading speed (or thereabouts — it's not an exact calculation).  If your reading is somewhat slow or not fluid, your writing will be likely a reflection of your reading.  You can never read too much.  One thing that I do and find helpful is to trace what I'm reading either in the air or on the tabletop.  I find that there are times when I can read the outline just fine, but I find myself having a bit of trouble executing the shorthand outline smoothly.    Keep up the good work.  Shorthand is a great skill.  It is worth doing and it is worth doing well.  🙂   Peter

Thanx, Andrew – a real good look inside the "stenotype world".   So, then, do you know if those celebrated "write-everything-out" reporters really exist? How is it possible to be that fast without briefs?   We certainly know that the Gregg champions like Swem used a great deal of judicious (and judicial!) abbreviation, and I love that you said that Gregg "is still just as fast as the fastest machine writers".   To get away from so much emphasis on stenotypy, I would also say that the famous Gurney system which dominated British court and parliamentary reporting for 200 years is, nevertheless, a very cumbersome system which technically should not be capable of the requisite speed.  It was very much like the modern Teeline system in concept, and Teeline is openly admitted not to be capable of more than 140 wpm. BUT, once again, there are court reporters who use Teeline, so what gives? I also mentioned in a previous post the Speedwriting whiz who got 200 wpm, and THAT is not supposed to be possible.

Kathy Dittmeier may be wrong, but she did not say that writing things out was some freakish phenomenon to be marevelled at and ignored; she said that "many" champion writers do it , and she even RECOMMENDS it as an alternative to having your practicing SLOWED DOWN by trying to learn a lot of briefs. Since this is  not a Chat Room, please don't anyone take my capitalization for "shouting"; it's just for emphasis because I'm not sure how to underline!   Also, the abbreviations used by the the court reporters, e.g. the 1913 Jury Charge I cited in another post, were not Anniversary or any other version of Gregg but rather an abbreviation technique owned by none of them.   Thanx, Andrew, for a good survey of stenotypy that I would never have found in such a succinct form on my own.   And, Peter, you have WAY more fortitude than I do. If I had had two years in high school and another year in college and still only got 140 wpm, I would have said to Heck with it! I've known Simplified for 40 years, used it off and on personally during that time, but only recently set out to find out what is required to get high speed. I feel that I am running into contradictory advice and theory on the subject.  That is why I keep citing cases where Speedwriting or Teeline or Gurney writers got high speeds, because all the claims made for versions of Gregg, or for Stenotypy, etc.are contradicted by those cases.   Conversely, people apparently get what they are told to expect.  No one even expects to type 130 wpm as Cortez Peters' students regularly did, and then they go out and get a Dvorak keyboard and think they've discovered a miraculous answer to that quaint old QWERTY keyboard and they STILL can't get 130 wpm.  Then I am told that Anniversary is the magic key, and, as I have cited, it is not, i.e. it does not explain what really happens.  V-Lindsay said she knows more than 70 pen writers in Mississippi alone, and they would have to be (unless they are 95 years old) graduates of Diamond Jubilee courses, and, I know that they did not go back and spend several years or more re-learning Anniversary. One that I have spoken to personally said she finished her college DJ course and "I already had the speed" she said. She then got some mentoring from a few nearby court reporters and went to work in that field herself, and she did not spend years doing this, either.   Anyway, to repeat, I am not knocking anyone's theory or practice, but just saying that I am confused by it all.   I'm not criticizing anyone for what they are doing and for the obvious good results they are getting. I am simply saying that the explanations given for the success of various people contradict each other. Therefore, I don't know how to practice unless I just flip a coin to decide who to trust, and that is too unscientific to suit me.

I think one thing that may happen to a lot of people is that if the original way they are introduced to and try something doesn't work, they will just drop it and decide it's not their cup of tea, where if they had been introduced in another way it may have worked out. Barbara Blackburn is famous for failing typing in high school and then finding the Dvorak keyboard later and going on to become a champion typist. Others found the usual keyboard comfortable and became champions with it.   With all the systems of shorthand there have been, all the versions of each one, I can imagine any one of them might easily have turned someone off and another might not have done. That's why I keep exclaiming about the great success people have had with what appear to be quite contradictory systems according to theory. For that matter, that's what attracted my attention to this aspect of stenotype – I thought it was just one thing, read confusing reports, and now, with Andrew's fuller explanation I realize that even THEY have conflicting "schools of thought"  and each side is convinced that the other is doomed to failure even as they obviously do succeed.   In Gurney's 1835 book, he says: "The practice of placing a character above or below the line; and also varying it, by thickness or length, I totally expunge; as it could never be written swiftly, with any tolerable degree of precision."  He reduced the original 436 briefs of Mason's system to only 100, and, as I said in the earlier post, the Gurney System dominated British Parliamentary and court stenography for 200 years. Obviously, Pittman and then Gregg went on to prove Gurney quite wrong, Pittman using both character thickness and placement, and Gregg, only length.

I'm not disagreeing in any sense with any of the things you are saying AnniversaryFan; I am only trying to define what it is exactly that we are practicing.   After the train of thought which came out in the 1913 Jury Charge thread, here is what I would have said:   When you first learn Gregg you are mostly learning to just write things you hear, only using a different and more fluid alphabet. There are a few briefs, but mostly just writing things as they sound.  Most students can write up to 120 wpm this way, and I believe this, plus or minus, is a natural plateau. However, we hear of more advanced writers who supposedly can write up to 250 or more wpm; I believe this is a false idea based on a misconception: no one ever writes out that many words, but instead they always write the same 120 wpm. They may hear 250 words being spoken during a minute's time, but they abbreviate extensively, even judicously omit many words, but the ink actually on the paper will be the equivalent of 120 or so words. It could even be theorized that this natural plateau is due to normal human speech on the average being somewhere around 120-150 wpm, and, again, that is close to what proficient students predictably get. Peter speaks of getting 140 wpm after two years of Gregg in high school and one more year in college.   To me, at least, and perhaps as a very pesky, picky person for which I apologize, it seems very important that we do NOT say: "I can write only 140 wpm, but Swem and the other champions wrote 250 wpm; wow! I wish I was that fast!" That's exactly what happened to me, and I felt overwhelmed, actually hopeless. I wish someone had told me years ago that I was mistaken, that Swem and the others abbreviated to an astounding degree, even beyond what is found in Anniversary.   Now that I've bored everyone repeating all this, I am saying that when I found that stuff about the stenotypists who supposedly write everything out, it put a real crimp in my theory as described above.  I realize, as you say AnniversaryFan, that stenotype is different from pen writing, but as you also say, you got 120 wpm with stenotype, and, though it may have happened more quickly than it did with Gregg, it still was a far cry from 225 wpm, and I still maintain that stenotype is NOT the magic thing that too many people believe it to be.   I did believe it was magic practically, and I thought for years that it had long since blown Gregg writing out of the water for reporting purposes, and I only found out a few months ago that there are still many pen writers working as reporters. Everything on the Internet is about stenotype, and I only found out by a flukey contact with a voice writer that there were a few pen writers in my area, and, only when I found this Group did I find out that V-Lindsay knows of  70 of them!   So, then, if anyone can help, I would LOVE to know what that stuff about champion stenotypists writing everything out is all about. It is very suspicious to me, because it is exactly the same as the way I felt about Swem and the others until I came to understand what it really meant. I don't mean that Swem et al. weren't very proficient and worthy, just that they are human and did not actually write 250 wpm.   By the way, why DO some people talk that fast?! It is practically babbling!    

The physicality of writing 120 and 220 are the same.  The difference between the two is that the response time to write the outline once your hear the word is greatly reduced.  That's the whole point of making it automatic — and it can be done.  What makes the difference is that your response time is shorter.    As an example of the training required to achieve very high speed, following is an example of the course of study per unit in the Gregg Shorthand Reporting Course:   I.  Penmanship practice:     a.  New penmanship assignment, approximately 30 pages of practice:  3 hours.     b.  Practice corrected outlines on previous Intensive Exercises returned by instructor:  15 mins.     c.  Make one complete correct copy:  15 mins.     d.  Read corrected copy:  10 mins     e.  Dictation and reading back of corrected copy several times:  1 hour 20 mins Total:  5 hours   III.  Review of shorthand principles:  2 hours   IV.  Dictation and readng back of new matter:  4 hours   V.   Transcription of a dictated test on new matter:  1 hour   VI.  Special practice on outlines written incorrectly in dictation practice or on test in previous unit:  2 hours   VII.  Study and practice of material in unit of Gregg Reporting Course, approximately:  3 hours   VII.  Special study assignments:  4 hours.   Total hours for unit:  23 1/2 hours.   Not for the faint of heart.  There are 20 units in the course.    They go on to say:   The most imporant single part of the reporter's shorthand equipment is a perfect knowledge of the principles of his shorthand system.  Therefore, a part of this course will be a thorough review of the principles of Gregg Shorthand.  The assignment for this unit will be the principles given in Chapters I and II, pages 1 to 33, of the Anniversary Edition of the Gregg Shorthand Manual.  Go through these two chapters just as though you had never studied shorthand, writing each word in shorthand at least twice, and going through the two chapters in that manner at least twice.  As you do this, practice not only to learn the outline better, but also keep in mind that you are improving your shorthand penmanship by comparing your outlines with those in the text.   A perfect knowledge of the brief forms is essential to high-speed writing, you should plan to read the chart of brief forms at least two or three times a week, reading them in a different order each time.  Time your reading of the chart, and do not be satisfied until you can read every brief form on the chart correctly in a minute and a half.   The reporting course was devised by Charles Lee Swem and John Robert Gregg.  They oughta know how to do this.

Hi again, Andrew and Peter – Everything you both say is perfectly valid.  My only contention is that it all exists completely outside of codified Anniversary rules and theory and is not owned by it. There is hardly a shorthand system that does not use such rules for abbreviation because it is a matter of logic and of the nature of English.   The first critics of Pittman and, even later, of Gregg, were Gurney writers who had already been working for 50 years when Pittman came out and continued to work in Parliament and the courts for 100 years after it came out; they overlapped Gregg for almost 100 years.  Since they were very successful, and since they used abbreviation concepts which also showed up in Anniversary and elsewhere, I just don't like to see potential shorthand students cowed by a particular narrowed-down area of development such as Anniversary when help, inspiration and guidance abound elsewhere as well.  I particularly don't like Simplified, Diamond Jubilee and, yes, even Series 90, being relegated to stepchild status when I know that many of their users have been practicing court reporters or the equivalent for years.   To me, even Series 90 is a marvelous display of the fluidity and usefullness of  Gregg, and is emphatically not, in my opinion, the least bit a degeneration from an earlier Golden Age.   But most important to me is that abbreviation, being a logical concept, might very well need to be developed by the individual and made his own thereby.  As you both point out, there are easily abbreviated phrases to represent commonly occurring phrases and even sentences in court but also in other venues.  Memorizing an abbreviated phrase is not as handy and natural as making up one's own based on need and experience.   In spite of preferring Gregg in the end, I've spent a good bit of time with Briefhand/Personal Shorthand, also some with Gurney, and it influences how I think about abbreviation. In Personal Shorthand, used widely for over 50 years now, one would write "Are you absolutely sure about that?" as:   r u abs sr a t?   r is a brief form for: are, or, our, return, record u is a brief for you, under, up, us abs is an opportunistic abbreviation whose meaning is inferred from context sr is readable as "sure" because one of the rules is to read "s" as "sh" when needed a is a brief for a, an, and, at, about t is a brief for that, to, too, there, thank   It works very well with even modest familiarization and is widely used. It can be typed, and there is no reason not to use just such briefs and abbreviations with Gregg if one wishes.   Anniversary is a very dense and complex area of study, and not only should no one be held back by not deciding to study it, I believe there are successful reporters who didn't have the time nor, in some cases, even know that Anniversary existed.

I have a soft spot for Series 90.  It was what I first learned, and to its credit, they returned work to "r-k".  I did find that it wrote too much out and outlines were a little too long.  I adopted Anniversary because I wasn't turned off by the memory load.  I also found that the word beginnings and endings help to make writing outlines a bit easier.    The various revisions of the manual after the Anniversary Manual came about because the focus of shorthand learning had retreated from the verbatim reporter arc.  Simplification of the theory and reduction of memory load became more attractive becase the majority of students were not going to go on to verbatim reporting.  The speed demands in the business office are lower than in reporting work.    If you want to get the real skinny on Gregg and his shorthand system, see if you can get a copy of "The Story of Gregg Shorthand" written by Louis Leslie.  Dr. Gregg gives an in depth discussion of how he divised the system and gives his story of coming to the United States and nearly single-handedly introducing the US to his system.  He was also a remarkable teacher.  The shorthand written in the 1901 manual was the last to be written by Dr. Gregg himself.    As for how we order our depos, that is one area where the machine writers are superior.  It still takes two weeks to get your final transcript, but being able to get a rough ascii helps to have the testimony handy.  Now that trial is turning more and more into a multi-media extravaganza, and more and more testimony being presented by video from depositions, the transcripts are synched to the video and you can play the excerpts cleanly and edit out objections of counsel and discussion between the attorneys on the record.  Some depositions can be very contentious.  🙂 

Oops! I hit the Send button by accident – so much for my even being allowed in the same room with hi-tech equipment!   Anyway, in spite of your being very involved in "modern methods" you find it meaningful to pursue Gregg, from Series 90 all the way back to the halcyon days of Anniversary.  No question that the skill involved must be beneficial to one's general well-being – I'd even bet that more such things would prevent Alzheimer's as they seem to to with people who keep mentally active.   So to confess a somewhat mercenary motivation, I don't think I would go on that seriously with Gregg unless I thought I could end up with a marketable skill; do you think that is possible?

Thanx – lots of good ideas about using Gregg.  This also brings up an issue I hear a lot about from employment counselors – don't sit around waiting for someone to ask you, and don't be intimidated by "Want Ads" or their absence – just pick something you want to do – a skill you have to offer – and go out and offer it.

That's really interesting, V-Lindsay – exact figures to give some idea of what's going on out there!   Does this mean that the pen writers sort of took it on themselves to choose and stick to Gregg in the absence of encouragement from the surrounding culture? The pen writer I spoke to (she's in Amory, MS) said she started before a state test requirement was in place, so she never had to worry about that part of it.  I believe I remember that you said you were working in a law firm for a while anyway, but that you also knew active pen writers, too, so it must have seemed natural to move into that area, i.e. it was an observable reality out there.  As I've said so often, if you just look up "court reporting" on Google or even read an encyclopedia article on the history of shorthand, you will get the distinct impression that the machine won out long ago.   By the way, the voice writer I first spoke to (Columbus, MS) who put me in touch with the pen writer, said that she was usually given a week to produce a transcript, but that lawyers were bad about saying, "Oh, incidentally, we have to be in court day after tomorrow, so …" and then she'd be up all night doing the transcript. It's also interesting – and sweet revenge for someone like me who is not thrilled with mechanization – that she said her voice recognition software doesn't recognize her voice every day, so she has to fall back on the back-up tape. She also said that the stenotype courses at Ole Miss (University of Mississippi at Oxford – Faulkner and all!) had been discontinued and that one must trek to south Alabama to study stenotype. It would be a real hoot if the stenotypists went the way of the dodo while there are still pen writers at work! I guess it would be the voice writers who put them out of business.   In this case, I must say that the whole thing gets to look kind of ridiculous. There are so many canny kids who may as well be acoustic engineers with all their computer, iPod, and YouTube experience, they could just go to court and get a perfect-as-you-please tape of everything that went on. The old days of just plopping a tape recorder down on the table and hoping for the best are long gone anyway – background noise, mumbling speakers, etc. – the sound geeks know how to filter and tweak to a fare-thee-well, and could produce a really great tape!  And, of course, Peter, there's the multimedia extravaganza that you described.

Hi Ian – I wouldn't flame you for what you said about pen writing – in fact I'm trying to learn to avoid the appearance of flaming anyone for anything even if they are stu …, oops, uh, I mean even if we do disagree.   In fact, I've felt for a long time that pen writing was at least part nostalgia over practicality, maybe just something we could "get away with" at best. Not that it can't be used very successfully, but you see what I mean.   Too, when I referred to "acoustic engineers" I meant those people on the CSI crime shows who purportedly can retrieve info from damaged cell phones, clean up background noise on intercepted phone calls, even restore data from a hard drive that suffered a bomb blast.  At least theoretically, one could filter out voices in a certain pitch range, filter out extraneous noises, echoes and reverb in a court room, etc.  An appropriate course or two in acoustics would be probably less demanding than the same courses in stenotype.   Also, now that stenotype is computerized to expand briefs and abbreviations into full text – which often screws up – there is no reason not to use an ordinary keyboard, since even the Autocorrect function of MS Word can expand any desired abbreviations into full text, let alone what specially designed software such a EZText and others can do. EasyScript is the one I've looked into, and it really works. The abbreviations are simple in theory – you write by hand or typing the first 4, 3, or 2 letters of a word along with the last 0, 1, or 2 last letters respectively.  This way an astounding number of words can be distinguished uniquely, and yet, too, the abbreviations are fairly obvious and not just a long list of arbitrary briefs to be memorized.   A little off-topic, but the crime aspect reminds me of a TV show that I could never get on my cable system – Sue Thomas FB Eye – about a real-life woman who worked for the FBI as an expert lip-reader and who could figure out what people on surveillance videotapes were saying.

(I'm not sure what's happened with the formatting there – sorry!)

I'm very honoured that you would quote one of my posts, ukulele144.   I believe Charles Rader, who wrote shorthand plates for McGraw-Hill for the Simplified, DJS and maybe the first edition of S90 also believed that the longer he wrote shorthand the longer he wrote shorthand. It's in the preamble to one of my DJS texts.   But I'm not sure you could get to 200 or 225 without using a significant number of abbreviations and brief forms even with the fewer strokes to write sounds that Gregg and Pitman have.   I'm sorry, I do not believe that someone can write Speedwriting or Forkner at 200 or 225 wpm.   Does anyone know if there have ever been Speedwriting or Forkner court reporters?   sidhetaba

Thanx for interesting input Sidhe – I myself doubt that one could write everything out in Gregg and still be all that fast.  I only asked again because Ian repeated what I had heard before, that it is possible for not only stenotype but also for Gregg, and, then, why do you suppose Rader would say such a thing?!   As I said, it's mostly a painfully practical matter for me. With limited time for practice, turtle-like progress at best, etc. I am horrified at spending a year or more trying to learn and automatize briefs when in that same year I might get the same results by writing things out. This is especially true given that the "be-all-and-end-all" of proficiency is NOT having to stop and think. Just writing what you hear eliminates a large element of arbitrariness that comes with briefs.  Even though they may be logical, that itself is a thought process that one does not have time to think  through. On the other hand, if I start by writing everything out and then abbreviate by simply stopping when I have enough of the word to suffice, that is not something you have to memorize or think about much.   Nevertheless, I still want to know as a matter of intellectual curiosity what the exact deal is.  I DID hear of a Speedwriter who got 200 wpm, and in one of the posts on Anything Goes, I think it was Ian who said there was once an Advanced Teeline book that offered 200 wpm.  And, however much we may think Gregg is great (and I do) we also owe allegiance to our forebears, and in that case it would be the Gurney writers who did court and Parliamentary reporting for 200 years. 
Thomas Gurney wrote the official book in 1835 detailing the practice of his father and grandfather before him who had adapted William Mason's 1672 system.  That system is considered primitive compared to Pitman and Gregg, so how did it work so well?   Given the strong mental element in stenography, it makes a huge difference how one conceives of and thinks about all these things.   Now that I've said that, I must also comment on the role of memory even though I'm getting pretty far afield: there is no question to me that the writer must hear and remember one or more sentences being spoken while he is yet still writing down the previous sentence or two. That's all the more reason that stopping to think how to write an outline would be disastrous, because you'd be distracted from hearing what the speaker is now saying and lose it. I.e. it's not just that stopping to think slows you down, it makes you lose awareness of the speaker. For all we know, some very fast writers just cultivate/have a prodigious memory and might retain a whole paragraph that they then leisurely write out. Truman Capote, though a notorious yarn-spinner, I admit, claimed that he and other reporters he knew had trained themselves to save the bother of taking notes during an interview and remember later verbatim what was said. I actually have witnessed a bit of that a time or two.   Jim

Hey, again, y'all:   Forgive me for not mentioning that I already use at least 100 briefs all the time, and they are practically automatic.  I should have explained that I'm speaking about all this from a theoretical point of view, not that of a frustrated beginner. I use most of the joined/disjoined word beginnings and endings in Simplified, though I honestly believe that the ones in Anniversary are more arcane and probably not all that useful in most contexts.   However, I am frustratingly slow in that anything much past 100 to maybe 120 wpm seems impossible to me, but on the other hand, I can also write Personal Shorthand which is purely alphabetic at about 100 wpm, too, so it makes me wonder what to think about different systems and their capabilities. Do you see what I mean? If I am at about the same place with both, then whether I can speed both of them up feels like the same proposition to me except that theoretically Gregg and not alphabetic is "speed-up-able".  But how do I know?   Another thing, the briefs may account for the 100-200 high frequency words which make up most of the literal NUMBER of words we write, but they do not account for the bulk of actual letters written; they are fairly short. The average high school student knows and uses as many as 42,000 words, and any of them can pop up at any time to make you pause and screw up royally in reporting or dictation. So, one thing I DO know for sure: nobody is going to have already automatized 42,000 words, and be ready to write them instantly. UNLESS maybe this is why it is better to practice writing everything out by sound, and then you will be ready for anything that comes up.   But, I'm just confused, not decided, about any of this!   Jim

> I can also write Personal Shorthand which is purely alphabetic at
about 100 wpm

I'm interested in how abbreviated that is compared to, say, DJS.
is Personal Shorthand phonetic? Many principles, brief forms?

> why do you suppose Rader would say such a thing?!

I'd love to know, too. It always struck me as intentionally oblique.

I'm with Chuck on the abbreviation issue; who'd *want* to write Gregg
out all the time? Abbreviation isn't just to shed sounds that would be
unnecessary in any system, but also the less facile combinations in the
particular system (and there are a number in Gregg).

But I don't see why abbreviation needs such defense. Brief forms and
plain old terminal-chopping are the *least* difficult things to learn
and use because they don't require thought, just recall. (This is one
of the things old-fashioned Gregg gets right.) A more methodological
abbreviating device makes you run through the algorithm for every case
you haven't encountered 6 times yet.

And as sidhetaba says, by the time you've used a brief form or arbitrary
abbreviating device a certain number of times, it's practically
impossible not to do so—*especially* when the facility is very great:

k – a – k – [disjoined st]!!!!

Well, the title of this thread is "Happily Conflicted" and that's how I feel, not for or against briefs and abbreviation, because I use them happily with Personal  Shorthand/EasyScript.  I think I just got spooked by all that talk of writing things out in full, first from the stenotype people and now from Rader!   Do you see what I mean that if I practice writing out as much as I can, then I might feel more prepared for any word that comes up, but if I have to remember whether I know a brief or abbreviation from Anniversary,etc., that adds an extra mental step. Or, if the possibility of writing things out and ever gaining speed is just a myth, then let's find out who's promugating it and make then swallow a fountain pen!   Personal Shorthand and EasyScript have slightly different rules, but they also use many of the same ideas that Gregg does.  PS has 26 briefs that each stand for several words, e.g. "r" can be read as "are, or, our, record, return".  Gregg uses plain R for just "are,or,our", of course. Gregg uses L for "well, will" where PS goes farther and uses "l" for "all, also, will, well, letter." Both PS and EasyScript do exactly as Gregg does with prefixes and suffixes, though EasyScript does it more: initial "p" is read as "pur-, pro-, per-", final "m" is read as "-ment", etc. This all goes to show that the logic and concept of abbreviation is somewhat universal.   I guess I'd rather just either write Gregg or alphabetic and not mix them up.  Abbreviation is all that alphabetic has to fall back on, and Gregg is a fluid, much-faster-to-write alphabet than standard handwriting which would speed up your work even if you never abbreviated.  Then there are the really, to me, crude mixtures such as Speedwriting and Forkner which change the alphabet some but not all, and then also write partly phonetically and partly not. Personal Shorthand and EasyScript bring in some phoneticism such as "sla" instead of "sleigh", "fon" instead of "phone", etc., and, of course, Gregg is partly but not entirely phonetic unless you use the diacritical marks in Anniversary, but that is too slow, just as it was found to be in Pitman.   However, (conflicted again!) I would write "prp" in alphabetic and it could mean "purpose", "perpetrator", or "prepare" depending on the context, and I see no reason not to to the same in Gregg, not so much studying and learning abbreviations already thought up by others, but just using your own; most of them are very natural and come to mind without much thought.   Maybe one more thing: we're thoroughly familiar with English writing and spelling, doing it fairly automatically.  I like the idea of first learning to write in Gregg just as we did English; it's sort of like learning to spell all over again. This could have more to do with our speed than whether we use briefs or not.    

Hi – just looked up the  Kingsley Read alphabet and realized it was what I just called "Shavian" after Shaw, of course. It is much simpler than Roman letters, but I don't know how fast anyone ever got with it.   I still think Gregg is the best way so far that anyone ever REALLY simplified writing, i.e. if I could ever get used to keeping my stroke length right!   Jim