Video of Shorthand writing?

GeneralArjaan Miah17

Hello all!

 

I feel sort of weird asking this, but I’ve always felt that the one resource that would help the most, that I’ve never found, is a video of someone writing in shorthand.

I’m studying Anniversary Gregg, and I was hoping that someone would humour me by providing one!

I feel like a video would really help to get some sort of basic idea of pen-grip, speed, etc.

 

 

Thanks!


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17 comments Add yours

  1. There are some videos on YouTube: you can search for "shorthand writing." It will give you an idea, although the writer in some of them did not use a steno pad, was skipping outlines and lines on the paper (the speed was too fast for the writer), and was pinching the pen.

  2. I wonder if there were any footage of the old masters of speed e.g. Dupraw etc. ?

    I know Dupraw lived very old and kept working as a court reporter into his nineties. Surely there must be footage somewhere?

  4. Search for "Gregg wpm" on YouTube and several videos come up.  I find it a fun reading exercise to try to follow along and try to recognize the outlines as they are being written.  It adds to the challenge that the outlines are a little sloppy and sometimes words are dropped. I too wish there were more videos showing  shorthand being written at speed. I'm a self taught DJS writer, and even though this is Anniversary shorthand, seeing gregg shorthand being written is inspirational and educational to me. 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inTf7SM0zaM is a video of anniversary shorthand being written on an ipad.

     

     

  5. Beware of posts from students. Many of them are struggling. I can't find it now, but there was a video of a German parliamentary reporter, writing a formal speech at high speed. I think it was German. Very calm, relaxed, pen gliding effortlessly.

  6. The video that Christine recommends is by a professional Brazilian stenographer named Waldir Cury. If you visit his youtube channel Walcury, you will find this video and two others about recommended practice methods, plus three about the history of shorthand, with strong emphasis on the Tironian Notes. Each video is either dubbed, subtitled or titled onscreen in one of a variety of languages: all in French, Spanish and Italian; most also in Portuguese, English and German. Unfortunately, the writing demonstrated is by students, most of whom pinch their pens. The system they're using is apparently Maron.

    The two or three videos about German shorthand that I've seen don't show much shorthand being taken, if any.

    For an example of the writing technique of a shorthand expert, I recommend the BBC clip of Mary Sorene writing Pitman. The URL is https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34603886.

    3. Thank you LVW. I’m surprised by this video: I thought Pitman had thick and thin strokes, yet she writes with a normal pen and writes with equal thickness all along… Is there an explanation for this?

      1. This is an interesting observation. She is indeed writing with a ballpoint pen, and there doesn't seem to be any thickening. I looked especially at her sample sentence near the end of the video. The word "day" is the only one, if I remember right, that should have been thickened, but it seems not to be. Maybe she trained herself to write this way, or maybe she just didn't have the right tools for the demo. (For what it's worth, I couldn't make out how she came up with her writing of "London" either. It looks to me like either l-n-k or l-n-nther.)

        1. Whoops – I think I'm wrong. She must be writing lnd-n. The final n looks pretty straight, rather like a k, but the first symbol is clearly an l with an n-hook. If she's writing the l half-length, then it's lnd rather than just ln.

          (By the way, I can't write Pitman, and usually can't read it. But I know the basics, and if someone tells me what a well-written passage means, I can usually recognize how all the words and phrases in it are constructed.)

    2. Congratulations on your abilities in both Gregg and Pitman! On another subject entirely, a Gregg instructor in another video used the word gramálogo; very Pitmanesque terminology. (I believe Pitman invented the words "grammalogue" and "logogram".)

        1. I figured this was the case, but I was surprised that Spanish has chosen Pitman's word. This leads to a question: Is Spanish terminology for shorthand phenomena more homogeneous than the English? It seems each system of English shorthand has its own terms for ligatures, abbreviations, single-phrase outlines, etc.

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