Recently I’ve talked with a few people about the shorthand they studied in school. I’ve been interested in their responses.
One woman, in her 50s, studied shorthand in high school and hated it; she thought it strange.
Another woman, now in her 80s, studied shorthand and actually trained to teach it; she did her student teaching in a shorthand classroom (though she wasn’t very good at it). She had nothing good to say about shorthand.
I also spoke to my cousin, whose mother, who would now be about 90, studied shorthand as a teenager. She then worked as a secretary to a county judge for a number of years. I understand that she used shorthand on the job, but no one ever observed her using it in her personal life.
I guess this is a common opinion, or there would still be lots of older people around who studied shorthand as a young person and never stopped using it! As I’ve said before, I’ve only observed one person writing shorthand in real life, a school secretary who was still using it in the early 90s. But since I think it’s a brilliant system, it’s disappointing to me to believe that it worked out so poorly for so many people.