This might be a common question, but is there a general rule for when I’m supposed to make my E’s and A’s clockwise vs counterclockwise? Every time I feel like I’m starting to understand, it turns out I did it the wrong way.
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The Notehand books don’t give explicit rules for how to write the vowel loops because the student was meant to slowly pick up how it’s done through reading and copying the examples. You can read the rules though that were given in the other versions, as they would apply to Notehand as well. There’s a summary of rules for Anniversary that should help you, and you’ll only need to read the first couple pages to get the gist of them – here’s a link to it you can download:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hnut4mdyaumzx2n3t4652/Review-of-Gregg-Shorthand-Principles-1942.pdf?rlkey=ok8qlw0ss7t5k3mhdbl11sj8k&dl=0
Well that’s brilliant! Where in the world did you find that document?
Your comment that the “rules” apply to all versions (including Notehand) is exactly on target. The “basic principles” didn’t really change from version to version.
Lee
That pamphlet was published as a training aid and reference material for federal government employees in the 1940s and it summarizes Anniversary Gregg very well. In addition, specialized vocabulary used in various agencies was published in pamphlets by the federal government as well. I have seen these come once in a while on eBay and I believe archive.org have some of these materials digitized.
I have a “Naval Terminology” book, and also “Technical Vocabulary from the Gregg Writer”.
I wonder how useful they were. It’s fascinating that they were produced. A whole different world.
I think this pamphplet about the basic principles was probably much more on target. If you know the principles, everything else falls into place.
Lee
Units 1 and 2 of the Anniversary manual explain how to join circles to straight lines and curves, Andrew Owen’s site has both units with enlarged models so that the joinings can be remembered easily. Click here for Unit 1 and here for Unit 2. In general, circles are written inside curves and outside angles.
Lastly, the standalone circles for “a” and “e” (representing the brief forms “I” and “he” in Anniversary) are written counterclockwise, just as if you were to write the letter “a” in longhand.
Here’s another doc for principles of joining, for the most recent editions of Gregg shorthand.
Sean–that’s a fantastic document summarizing the Gregg Anniversary “rules.” I had never seen it before, and it shows how much more intricate Anniversary is over later editions. Louis Leslie introduced the “Functional Method” of teaching Gregg Shorthand in 1935 which was an attempt to avoid teaching the rules of shorthand, per se. The method uses a language-arts approach to learning shorthand theory, rather than a science-type approach, which most teachers used up until that time. The initial textbooks in Gregg Shorthand were available in both the functional method and the traditional method through the Diamond Jubilee series. There were many other characteristics which distinguished the two methods, and many teachers, in practice, used a combination of the two methods. In the pure functional method (sometimes called the reading approach), writing was not introduced until Lesson 19, while in the traditional method (sometimes called the writing approach) writing was introduced from the start (Lesson 1) or Lesson 6 at the latest.