Yesterday, we talked a bit about the role of a stenographer and ended with a comment about using shorthand. Shorthand is a way of writing that uses symbols to represent the sounds of words, rather than letters – once you know it, it’s much faster than using words and letters!
Learning it is the challenge! So today, for your daily dose of history, we promise to distract you for quite a while with the first lesson of Isaac Pitman’s Brief Course in Shorthand. Rather than scanning the actual book, we’ve “borrowed” this lesson from google – you can see the whole book here.
This is one of the standard textbooks used for decades to teach students how to write in Pitman. My mother used one of these when she was in secretarial school in the 1970s! Well, published perhaps a little more recently than 1914, but virtually the same book.
Lesson 1 emphasises that this is a way of writing sounds, not words – remember that as you read on!
Have you written your “several lines of each character?” Repetition is important for memory…though perhaps a little dull and boring!
Okay, I want to see your representation of those words in Exercise 2! Take a picture of your paper and post it in the comments!
How are you doing? I’m starting to get a little frightened…
Read, copy, and transcribe, huh? I think I met my match about two pages ago! How did you do?