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How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen
- vxNsr 12y agoI got so excited when he said that it really was possible to write at 100 words a minute but then he said that it's nearly impossible to actually learn Gregg, I wonder if there's a website somewhere.... About the Livescribe: it's an okay pen but difficult to hold. and somewhat awkward because of the camera at the tip, but it could depend on the way you hold pens.
- 6d0debc071 12y agoThe old manuals are on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/1916GreggShorthandManual-5thVersion1916 https://archive.org/details/1916GreggShorthandManual-5thVers...
- shadowfox 12y agoJust want to add that there are other shorthands which are pretty solid (and more easily available). For example, Pitmans: http://www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand.org.uk/ http://www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand.org.uk/
- danohuiginn 12y agoI'd advise against Pitmans, unless you plan to take it very seriously. Pitmans is one of the more complicated forms of shorthand, and relies on differentiating between hard and gentle lines. I found Teeline, for instance, much easier to get going with.
- coldpie 12y agoI think it's only useful to learn if you actually do a lot of writing, especially in time-sensitive situations like dictation or interviews. If it's just something you're interested in as a novelty, but you don't actually do more handwriting than a few notes during meetings at work, you're probably not going to get enough practice to have any success.
- sj4nz 12y agoWhile Gregg shorthand is great for English, its not much use for anything technical. Many of the shorthand idioms are based on the word-sound, not the word-spelling, so it's okay if you're taking notes for yourself, reading someone else's shorthand becomes an exercise in decoding the word in context because you were not there for their experience during note-taking. If you don't stay fresh with your own shorthand, just like your own source code, you can find yourself re-reading your own work and wondering what you were thinking!? That's kind of what this pen in the article semi-solves, by having an audio recording synched with your shorthand.
- EdwardCoffin 12y agoMy understanding is that it was not generally expected that notes taken by one person would be interpretable by another. This is what I've been told by my mother, who learned and used Pitman shorthand. She says she never had to read anyone else's notes, nor did anyone else ever have a need to read hers.
- saalweachter 12y agoReading other people's shorthand was common in larger companies. One secretary would take dictation, and pass it off to another secretary to type it up. Typing is slower than taking dictation, so you'd potentially have multiple typists typing up the same person's dictated letters at once.
- lelandbatey 12y agoThis is largely why note taking is a two pass process for me. The first is the pen and paper notes taken while speaking with someone else. The second is the process of transcribing and editing those notes onto some digital medium. I end up with a really nicely fleshed out document covering much more information, much more thoroughly. For example, for a more complex point in a discussion I may add an additional paragraph or two of background and context to what was actually talked about. I've found this process to be the best I've tried, and others who I share my notes with have voiced their liking.
- sikhbeats 12y ago> Gregg eschews the parade of silent letters, like the “y” in “bay” that make English so difficult to learn as a second language. I stopped reading here. I can't take this drivel seriously.
- thrill 12y agosrsly?
- BonsaiDen 12y agoAt least for me - a native German speaker with English as a self taught second language - I find that the `y` in bay actually makes it easier to figure out the correct pronunciation. Since `a` is pronounced as `ah` in German, just having `ba` would make the `a` sound like the one in `bra`, which would make it hard to distinguish between `ba(y)` and `ba(h)` when first learning the language. Removing the y's would also leave one with seemingly strange words like `awa`, `ga`, `sla` and `sta`. Which quite honestly to me, look much more like mnemonics rather than actual English words.
- krisgee 12y agoI'm a native english speaker I'd make the same assumptions about "ba" as you would. I'm not sure what accent "ba" would be pronounced "bay" in.
- pessimizer 12y agoOne where the graph 'a' referred to the long a sound only?
- jrochkind1 12y agoMaybe it works because there is no english word written 'ba', and in fact no english word that's 'b' followed by vowel(s) and nothing else, except for 'bay'. So there's no other word it could be. But yeah, the extreme form of gregg shorthand definitely seems, from the OP, to rely on lots of contextual knowledge for it's concision. That seems to be it's strategy, eliminate letters where contextual knowledge will suffice to reconstruct them.
- egypturnash 12y ago"As a journalist, I begin most interviews by..." ...talking about my cool pen and Gregg Shorthand for a couple of minutes. Well that's a great way to spend the possibly limited time your interviewee has to talk to you.
- brandonbloom 12y agoWhen hand-held tape recorders were new, I'm sure many journalists opened with "Have you ever seen one of these?" shortly before asking "Is it OK if I record this conversation?". Seems like a perfectly reasonable 30 second exchange to ensure that the interviewee is informed and comfortable.
- wpietri 12y agoWhen I do user interviews, I always try to talk a little bit at the beginning about something not directly relevant. It's especially good when I can offer something about myself; if I open up to people, they'll often open up more to me. It may look like a waste of time, but the better results say otherwise.
- muaddirac 12y agoI don't see the utility of shorthand anymore. If you're just taking short notes, you don't need to write 225wpm...and if you've recorded everything, then you can listen to the recording later and take notes or type up a transcript verbatim. It would seem better to learn a stenography system so you don't waste time inputting actual text, which surely you would need to do anyway? (How is the time the author saves writing in shorthand not negated by the time it takes her to type it up afterwards?) I guess if you knew shorthand and steno, you could do everything pretty quickly.
- randallsquared 12y agoHe only types up small portions of (apparently) long interviews, for quotes. In this case, the combination of shorthand and the camera and software is like a jump-to-where-I-mean feature for audio recordings, which sounds amazing, frankly, for this use case.
- muaddirac 12y agoIt does sound really cool. I just don't get why the shorthand part is important. Why not jot "grandma" and "poodle" and then tap the pen there for when the interviewee starts talking about his grandma and his poodle.
- doorhammer 12y agoI was thinking about this. The pen sounded like a great way to create a fluid index of there conversation in a really simple outline form. No if it's setup to work like that at all I'd actually really like something similar with a computer while I type and record.
- eru 12y agoVoice recognition software might be good enough to create the index.
- 12y ago
- jamesli 12y agoThe shorthand is based on sounds, not spellings. So the difficulty is that the brain has to translate spelling into sounds first, which is a great barrier to overcome. There is a similar fast writing system (速写）in Chinese. I tried to learn it for a year while I was in high school, but gave it up eventually. Other than the extra difficulties of logograms vs phonograms, another barrier is that one need to translate the fast writings back to "normal" ones for easy reads later. Many times it is so hard to tell what I actually scribbled down.
- scrollaway 12y ago> So the difficulty is that the brain has to translate spelling into sounds first, which is a great barrier to overcome. It doesn't look like it's meant to be used to copy written text, but to take notes that have already been spoken, which is exactly the opposite to what you're describing - When I speak and you take notes, you essentially turn sounds into spelling.
- keithpeter 12y agohttp://www.nctj.com/journalism-qualifications/shorthand-teeline http://www.nctj.com/journalism-qualifications/shorthand-teel... UK journalists still do teeline shorthand. I used to have to help upload practice dictations for a colleague who taught teeline. Pitman's shorthand was the one used by secretaries when they took dictation. I was fascinated my my Mum's shorthand books as a nipper.
- ThrustVectoring 12y agoFor programmers, I don't think shorthand is the right technology to learn - stenographic typing has the same kind of advantages and speed, and directly inputs to the computer. Learning shorthand does make stenographic typing easier to learn (and vice-versa), since it's the same sort of syllable-based contraction.
- fsiefken 12y agoFor a stenographic typing solution that can work on a pc check Plover: http://plover.stenoknight.com/ http://plover.stenoknight.com/
- NoahTheDuke 12y agoHere's the 2013 PyCon talk given by one of the Plover developers, Mirabai Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g
- jimbobimbo 12y agoThis reminded me about my Pocket PC, which used to have a writing recognition mode that was a cross between Palm's stokes and regular writing (I could've been a 3rd-party keyboard). It was more accurate than regular writing recognition that Pocket PC had and thus faster for me to use. To this day my handwriting is altered by the way I was writing on that keyboard...
- ChuckMcM 12y agoLoved the exposition on Gregg shorthand, I tried and failed to master it in college sadly, but it also gave me new respect for the archivists who decipher notes on the margins of older texts, as those seem to be in their own shorthand, sometimes invented by the author of the margin note.
- malloreon 12y agoI was really hoping this article would end with the author revealing the Livescribe pen could expand Gregg shorthand written with it into standard characters on a computer.
- varkson 12y agoWait so that wasn't the point of using it? The author mentions custom OCR so I assumed he was using some sort of Gregg OCR solution.
- sp332 12y agoDoes he mention a custom one? I just saw this part: But it doesn’t work for me, I explain, because even though I’m recording this interview with the latest model Sky wifi smartpen, I’m taking notes using a 19th Century technology called Gregg shorthand.
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoIt would have to be a author-guided OCR though as the same symbols can represent different words.
- Osmium 12y agoI wonder how difficult it'd be to write OCR-style software for Gregg. It'd have to be more sophisticated; character recognition alone wouldn't be enough, you'd have to do a bit of Markov modelling with most probable sentences/words too. I guess it's so niche no one will ever do it, but it sounds like a fun project.
- err4nt 12y agoI used to have a palm pilot and I LOVED the 'graffiti' input mode with the stylus. You had an alphabet of simplified shapes and it made it very easy to enter something quickly without needing to ‘hunt and peck' on a miniature keyboard for the shift key or using shift keys to change modes. I wondered why nobody brought gesture-based inout to iOS this way. I don't care about 'handwriting recognition' of my own writing, I want a more efficient input method, even if I have to learn it and practice to be good at it. I'm not content with tapping one button for each character I want to record :S
- xrjn 12y agoI think an excellent input method for mobiles is Swiftkey. It has incredible accuracy, and it learns really fast as to what and how you type. Its intelligence beat all other keyboards that I tried, and I'm able to peak at over 60 WPM using SK with two fingers, and 40 WPM with 1 finger and flow. However, it gets tricky as soon as you get sloppy or start writing technical stuff, so I tend to stick with the traditional tapping method of input. There is a little bit of a learning curve to get optimal speed, but once you learn all the nuances and the shortcuts, it gets absolutely great. Typing long and detailed text is now reasonable on a phone, and quickly replying to something takes no time at all thanks to flow in my opinion.
- eru 12y agoA friend of mine swears by Swiftkey, too. They seem to have taken a turn for the evil on Android recently, though: still usable as ever, but bugging you every once in a while to try out new themes, or asking for overly broad permissions.
- bane 12y agoShorthand systems also exist in other languages. I'm aware that there was something called a "fast writing" system in Korea and a version of Pitman-Graham in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#Modern_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand#Modern_Japan
- eggy 12y agoI have been using the Echo Livescribe pen for 4 years now, and it has saved me on many occasions. I taught myself Quickscript before I ever had the pen, but because of the lack of OCR for it on the pen, I don't really use it much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript
- fardoche 12y agoI remember finding a textbook on Gregg shorthand in my grandmother's attic when I was 10 years old. It fascinated me (secret writing! esoteric knowledge!) and I spent a few afternoons practicing and inventing my own abbreviations, even using it to take notes in school once or twice, but my family bought a home computer not long after that, and all my energy went into learning BASIC.