With the introduction of the Diamond Jubilee Series (DJS) in 1963, Louis Leslie expanded on the simplifications that were introduced by him in 1949 in the Simplified Series (discussed here and in my comment here), based on analysis obtained from actual notes written from dictation by students and stenographers. The addition of more simplifications to the system had the purpose of eliminating hesitation in the creation of outlines and facilitating the learning of the system. Further, since pen shorthand was almost exclusively limited to the business office and since the language in business correspondence was rapidly changing with less reliance on stereotypical business phrases, additional speed expedients present in previous series were no longer necessary.
Following DJS, two additional series were published by McGraw-Hill in the US. Series 90 (S90) in 1978 and the Centennial Series in 1988 continued the refinements in the system that were introduced with DJS. For that reason, shorthand plates from these three series are virtually identical, and a writer of any of these series should have very little problems in transcribing texts from any of these. However, there are some differences. This post addresses the distinctions between the three series.
Series 90
The most noticeable change introduced in S90 relates to a reduction in the total number of brief forms. DJS contained 129 brief forms representing 148 words (contrast this to Simplified Gregg, which had 184 brief forms representing 227 words, and the Anniversary Series with 319 brief forms representing over 600 words, not counting words written according to the Abbreviating Principle). In contrast, S90 contains 115 brief forms representing 132 words.
1. The following brief forms were eliminated: put, why, great, those, use, big, how, gone, during, upon, merchant, merchandise, between, railroad, situation, shall, must, such, purpose, year, yet.
2. The following brief forms were added: usual (e-oo hook-sh), Ms. (m-left s), doctor (d-r), executive (e-right s-e-k-v), any (n-e). Notice that “doctor” and “any” were brief forms in Simplified and previous series of Gregg.
3. The following brief forms were modified: work (r-k), experience (e-left s-p), throughout (under th-r-a-oo hook). The brief form for “work” was restored “by popular demand” (as noted by the editors) to its previous form, given that the r-k form had been in use since the 1893 manual and was well-known to shorthand teachers. The outline for “throughout” brings the second part of the compound word to match the outline for “out.” The outline for “experience” was simplified because the previous DJS outline (e-left s-p-e-r) was often confused with “expert” (e-left s-p-r-t).
Additionally, the following changes were made in S90 theory:
1. The dot for wh- was eliminated, since most people pronounce words with wh- with the oo sound, rather than with the h-oo sound – this explains the elimination of the brief form for “why”, since it is now written according to rule.
2. The combination “mem” (and “mum”) is no longer represented by the men-blend. Hence, words like “remember” and “maximum” are written with the e and the oo-hook, respectively.
3. The word beginning “post” is written in full.
4. The word ending “-sume” was eliminated and the oo-hook is added. (However, the oo-hook is eliminated in “-sumption”, because of the omission of short u before m principle.)
5. Two changes to the Abbreviating Principle were added. First, the analogical ending “-graph” was added and represented by a g, and second, the word “statistic” is abbreviated through the second t (right s-t-a-t).
6. The combinations “ye-” and “ya-” are written with the corresponding circle vowel. As such, then “year” and “yet” are now written according to rule.
7. The phrases “more than” (m-over th-m) and “let me” (l-e-m-e) were reintroduced after being dropped in DJS.
Centennial
More refinements were introduced in the Centennial series. In this series, there are 139 brief forms representing 172 words. While this represents more forms than S90, words that were written according to the Abbreviating Principle in DJS and S90 (such as “anniversary”, “equivalent”, and others) were reclassified as brief forms in Centennial Gregg.
1. The following brief forms were added: appropriate (a-p-r-o hook-p), between (b-ten blend), communicate (k-k-a-t), direct (d-r-k), during (d-r), equip (e-k-p), include (over e-d), incorporate (e-nk blend), insure (n-sh), office (o hook-f), product (p-r-o hook-d), program (p-r-o hook-g), property (p-r-o hook-t-e), recommend (r-e-k). Of these, “between” returns to its original outline (changed in S90); “direct”, “during”, and “include” restore the outlines used in Simplified and earlier series; while “insure” uses the outline from the Anniversary (and earlier) series, which is also a reporting shortcut in the Simplified, DJS, and S90 Expert Speed books. Similarly, the new outline for “communicate” was a reporting shortcut introduced in the DJS and S90 Expert Speed books.
2. The following words are now brief forms, even though their outlines did not change: anniversary, circumstance, convenience (convenient), electric (written as the prefix over the line), equivalent, however, memorandum, privilege, reluctance (reluctant), significance (significant), statistic.
No brief forms that were present in S90 were eliminated in Centennial Gregg.
Further, the following changes were made in Centennial theory:
1. The analogical endings presented in the Abbreviating Principle section in S90 (“Abbreviated Words – in Families”) were added to the list of joined suffixes: “-quent”, “-tribute”, “-quire”, “-titute”/”-titude”, -“graph”.
2. The word endings “-ology” and “-iety” were added to the book, even though their writing was not changed. (Previously, they had been removed from the Simplified, DJS, and S90 books, although they were in the dictionary.)
3. Phrases with “ago” and “want” were eliminated.
4. The intersection principle was eliminated from the book discussion, even though it is still used (for example, “A.M”, “P.M.”, the brief form “quantity”, the outline for “New Jersey”).
5. Outlines for the states of the US now follow the USPS abbreviations, instead of using the previous special shorthand outlines.
Some of the principles that were eliminated in DJS and S90 (and present in earlier series of Gregg) were reintroduced in the “Expert” shorthand books and in special dictation vocabulary for medical, legal, and government fields presented in some of the Gregg Speed Building books, as they would considerably help in the attainment of higher dictation speeds.
I hope this post clarifies the distinctions between these three remarkably similar Gregg series.
Wow, Carlos, this is quite impressive!
I would add one more thing to Series 90: all multiple-meaning brief forms were eliminated. Each brief form had one and only one meaning. That’s why doctor/during and a few others went away. It was done, supposedly, to improve transcription speed.
Thanks Marc, and thank you also for bringing this brief form purge issue up. From what I’ve seen, the purge of the multiple meaning brief forms apparently started with DJS and continued with S90. In Simplified, there were 39 brief form outlines with multiple meanings. In DJS, this number was reduced to 18, and in S90 it was 16 (coming from the elimination of “how” and “year”).
The “doctor”-“during” pair is an interesting one. In DJS, “during” was the d-r brief form, and “doctor” was written in full (d-o hook-k-t-r). This choice retains the consistency of the writing of the “dur” combination in words like “during”, “endure”, “duration”, in which that combination is expressed by d-r. In S90, this choice was reversed: the brief form d-r became “doctor”, and “during” was written fully (d-oo hook-r-ing dot), and in so doing, words that start with “dur-” were now written as d-oo hook-r, whereas “endure” and its derivatives retained the d-r combination. In Centennial, both “doctor” and “during” are written with the same d-r outline as in Simplified and earlier series. (As to how “during” could be confused with “doctor” in transcription still baffles me, especially when that pair had been used for a long time in Gregg.)
The date of Centennial is 1988, not 1990. 1988 was the centennial year of Gregg’s publication.
It seems to me that by making all these little changes, which didn’t substantially change or improve anything, McGraw-Hill just made the whole picture confusing. I’m familiar with all these changes, but even so, reading through them makes me a little dizzy. I wonder how shorthand teachers coped with it.
Another point worth mentioning is the dramatic format change with Centennial. The books have lots of color on the pages, lots of color photographs, and for the first time the shorthand material was written on printed lines.
Centennial was also the first time there’s not an identified shorthand writer for the connected matter. It’s pretty clear that by that time, no one worked at McGraw-Hill who was capable of producing page after page of model-perfect shorthand.
Lee
I’m not sure why I wrote 1990 — I corrected it.
The post was not intended to address the teaching materials themselves. Starting with Simplified Gregg, I find the number of lessons used in the basic manual to present shorthand theory to be overly excessive: 54 lessons to present shorthand theory in Simplified, DJS, and S90, whereas the 1916 New and Revised Edition and the Anniversary manuals which contained more shorthand principles, had 20 and 36 lessons, respectively. (Even I find the Anniversary manual cumbersome with the arrangement of “Chapters” and “Units”!) However, Louis Leslie wrote the manuals to be used in a classroom setting and to make it easier on the teacher to use the manual. The Centennial manuals introduced objectives for each lesson — again, because they were designed for shorthand teaching in the classroom — but reduced the number of theory lessons to 40, a step in the right direction (but not enough in my opinion!).
The Centennial manuals were not the first ones to have Gregg Shorthand printed on lines. The two-volume set of “Gregg Shorthand for the Electronic Office” (S90) presented all the shorthand on a Gregg-ruled two-column format. The book used top binding with flip over pages, so that once you finished one side (flipping the all of the pages over), you would turn the book around and continue reading, now from the back to the front. Previously (1969), the book Programmed Gregg Shorthand (DJS) by Russell Hosler printed in regular binding used lined shorthand for some of the plates: the left side contained shorthand, while the right side had the printed transcription. Lines were also used in this book for word and phrase reading practice. However, the pioneer of using the two-column Gregg-ruled plates with flip over was South-Western Publishing in their “Shorthand Transcription Studies” books, starting with the first edition in 1944. This book was subsequently updated for Simplified and DJS and retained the same two-column lined top binding format. The faux pas in the Centennial books is not so much the use of the lines per se, but that the ruling is Pitman, with a line spacing of 1/2″, which does not match the shorthand notebooks that the students were using. So while the Centennial books were not the first ones to present lined shorthand, they were the first ones to present lined Gregg shorthand in a book with regular (side) binding for all of the plates.
Oh, yes, I forgot about the Electronic Office books . . . they also use a lot of color photos and color accents on the pages. I didn’t realize until you commented that they show the shorthand on lines–the lines are obviously there, but they’re printed pretty faintly.
Thanks for the observation about the line spacing in Centennial. That explains part of the visual “not quite right” effect.
Given that essentially every shorthand student would have been writing and practicing in a steno pad, do you know the reason why the majority of Gregg texts were printed without lines?
Lee
I don’t know the exact reason. Shorthand texts in Pitman did not have any lines either (only in certain sections where line placement was important), so I assume that Gregg originally didn’t think it was necessary to print lined shorthand plates either, since placement is generally not a concern. The paper used by the plate writers had very faint lines that disappeared when they were photographed for reproduction in the books. If there was a mistake, the outline was rewritten and literally pasted over the old outline before photographing. Adding the lines would probably have increased the production costs, with very little “return on investment”, so to speak.