I love real-world examples of how Gregg shorthand was used back in its heyday. Over decades of doing translations, I have seen it used to write love letters, yearbook inscriptions, verbatim legal hearings, tattoos, a will … even a suicide note once.
I thought I’d share a small snippet from a looong (and terribly interesting!) WW2 field diary. For those of you just beginning to learn shorthand, you should know that the penmanship used here is very poor – stick with using Carlos’s Penmanship Practice exercises and don’t try to emulate the example I’m posting here! For those of you more experienced, don’t be discouraged if you have a hard time translating this sample – it was written under stress and extreme conditions. (Translating this diary was like having a ringside seat, in real time, to the rawness at the frontlines in Italy in 1943).
I’ll be posting the translation immediately after the image, so don’t scroll down too far if you want to practice translating yourself before you see my translation! (You’ll see some marks over the very first line, and underneath the very last line. You can ignore those – they are bits of previous/following lines of shorthand that I cropped off).
TRANSLATION: October 1. Started to move at 9.30 and head down about 2 miles by B.
Then moved through the night with no rest. I drove part of time and over one river
Division started driving down the river. One D troop truck overturned –
otherwise OK. Naples captured.
2. Managed a couple of hours sleep in the morning. Then it poured with rain again.