Growing up, I was very familiar with shorthand. I knew all about it and I hated it! To me it was not efficient or cute. It terrorized me and my siblings. Why? My mom is fluent in it and she would write her Christmas lists in shorthand so that we would have no idea what Santa was thinking. Sometimes I even think that she would mock us by purposefully leaving it out in the open, knowing we wouldn't be able to decipher the list. One year she caught us in our basement storage room trying to go through her shorthand dictionary and translate her secret combinations.
My Mom is fluent in what is known as Gregg Shorthand. It is a written language of squiggles and curves that makes note taking more efficient. I called my Mom this week and had a little Q&A session with her about shorthand. My Mom learned shorthand in a high school course and then continued her studies in college. I asked her when she used it the most and she said, "I used it the most when I was a secretary for Gerald Lund in the Church Education System. He would dictate and I would transcribe it." She also mentioned that is has been useful for taking notes on our baby blessings and for, you guessed it, the cursed Christmas list. We talked about if it would be worth teaching it in schools nowadays and my Mom said that, although useful, writing in general, let alone shorthand, are becoming lost arts with the technology available nowadays. She said that most kids' handwriting these days look like the scribbles of her shorthand! Ouch! She openly admitted that she is having trouble keeping up with the times. My Mom loves handwriting. She has beautiful cursive and calligraphy. On my mission she sent me a hand-written letter every week. However, she struggles to turn on the computer and open Explorer or Firefox to send an email. I originally sent her the interview questions on an email and after multiple efforts of failed sends and computer glitches, she said she would just prefer to call me and tell me the answers. Something so normal for me is very foreign to her. The opposite is true for me and her shorthand skills.
Many civilizations have developed some sort of shorthand system in order to simplify of the process of recording what would otherwise be impossibly long proceedings or speeches. Imperial China, believe it or not, had a system of shorthand that was used to take notes on things such as court proceedings and criminal confessions (Source) You can check out this page to see various styles of simplified Chinese characters that are easier and quicker to write than the standard characters (Source) These forms of writing were developed as early as the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. - 220 A.D.) (Source)
I found a wonderful source that shares a great story about shorthand in China and its usefulness. It is too long to include as text in this post, but PLEASE check out this link to read it. The story is of a man writing in what is known as "grass script", or Chinese shorthand. He is recording faster than the speaker and talk, which surprises the speaker very much. The man then shares how he does it. Very interesting!!! Check it out, page 510.
How do you feel about shorthand? Do you think that it could ever catch on in schools if a standardized version was created and offered as a second language? Would you take it?
P.S. - The symbols after the first paragraph mean "Seize the Day" in Gregg Shorthand
Haha, my mom is a lot like yours, Scott. She can write letters and sign her name much more beautifully than I'll ever be able to, but she has ABSOLUTELY NOT IDEA how to work a computer. I'm not a computer genius, but I always become one whenever I'm around her. Although I know how to work a computer, I don't know how to write in shorthand like our mothers, which probably has a lot to do with the changing society that we live in. I think it's great that your Mom knows shorthand because it must really make it easy to record things like baby blessings, which can't be repeated or transcribed like all the talks that are given at General Conference. I wonder if people like Nephi or Alma knew some form of shorthand in their language. I'm sure that it made keeping records easier (obviously, as long as the shorthand records weren't immediately transcribed onto the plates of brass).
ReplyDeleteWow, I think learning shorthand would be extremely useful for note-taking in class. I can see where your mom is coming from on the knowledge of being able to write well is decreasing. I remember in elementary school having to work on my penmanship, and having to copy line after line of worksheets. However, with my younger sister, once she learned how to write the letters of the alphabet, they were done. My mom is a junior high teacher and, looking at some of her students' papers, you can see how much the skill of good penmanship is decreasing.
ReplyDeleteVer cool post Scott! Nice personal connection to your Mom's technique of Gregg shorthand. I agree with Jenna, the value of having good penmanship in our culture is rapidly decreasing. This could also be compared to the value of hand written math computational skills being less and less important in elementary schooling. The reason for both these degressions? The invention of the calculator and computer/typewriter. The need is no longer there, therefore the skill will eventually become obsolete
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing about a guy in a novel who manages to learn to write shorthand, only to figure out that he later has no idea what he's written.
ReplyDeleteI agree about handwriting declining too, but I'd add that maybe peoples' ability to read cursive writing is also declining, since we use it so infrequently.
I think it would be awesome to be able to take a shorthand class. As fast as typing notes is, I think that shorthand could still be faster...with the added advantage that if you wanted to add in some diagrams or something you could do that much more easily than on a computer.
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