As a newcomer here this year who has enjoyed reading and using the great wealth of material, I have not seen much detail about the rationale for DJS, so I wondered whether these attachments might be of interest. See also these links: Comparison of Simplified and Diamond Jubilee From Gregg Simplified to Diamond Jubilee
Changing the system to meet a requirement for training students for more modest office dictation speeds in a shorter time and/or for more reliable transcription seems to me to make sense. However I agree with Carlos that the motivation for change was also that McGraw-Hill wanted to make more money. As a retired teacher in a UK further education college (US = community college?), I can also appreciate the likelihood of pressure from the educational establishment and from employers to push more students through to an adequate standard. In “How System Changes are made in Gregg Shorthand” (from a copy of “Today’s Secretary”) it is said that advantages of the changes and lighter learning load were having extra time to spend on practising dictation and transcription, as well as being able to get somewhat less able students up to the target speed.
It’s all very personal, though, as one naturally has an attachment to the version one has learned. I (half) learned Simplified before going on to use the DJS manuals and ended up writing a mixture. The one thing I particularly dislike about DJS is the writing out of the “ou” sound before “n” etc as I think it is much slower than the Simplified omission. So I don’t do it. As for the word “etcetera”, in the DJS outline it is written out in full, yet in the real world the word is almost always written “etc”, which is about as quick to write in longhand as the DJS outline! On the other hand, I do think getting rid of all those pen-lifts for past tenses and “-r” in Simplified is an improvement.
I understand from this blog and elsewhere that DJS is slower than Simplified, but nowhere have I seen more than fairly vague estimates of the difference. So I was interested to read in “Memory Load of Simplified and D-J compared” that their study found DJS had slightly over 4% more strokes than Simplified in the sample. So does that mean its lower speed potential is of a similar order?
Presumably this lower speed potential could be improved by more, well-chosen, brief forms and shortcuts.
I think it would be really interesting to share ideas on an updated set of brief forms to reflect modern needs and for more general use than the business focus of versions from Simplified onwards. Maybe it’s different in the US, but I don’t think I have ever had to write the word “merchant” – apart from in Gregg exercises, that is.
Attachment: how-system-changes-are-made-in-gregg-shorthand.pdf
Attachment: memory-load-of-simplified-and-d-j-compared.pdf