Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type (opens in new tab)

I prefer Gregg shorthand to Pittman because Gregg doesn't require variable stroke width and thus it's easier to write with a ballpoint pen.

That reminds me a lot of the game TUNIC, where, similarly, a big part of the game is figuring out the language.

A similar game is The Expression Amrilato, a love story where you gradually learn the language Esperanto. After beating the game, you've learned a real language, and can now speak with people from around the world. You also learn, however, an idiosyncratic writing system which is only useful within the game.

Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).

Try out Forker shorthand. You can learn it gradually, and the first steps are omitting vowels and simplifying some letters. You then progress to various abbreviations. Ultimately, it's based on the English cursive so there's nothing too exotic to learn in terms of orthography, although I guess if you are younger there is a chance you never learned a cursive style! I'm a novice but feel like it doesn't hurt readability that much, and it's quick to learn.

Quick intro: https://imgur.com/a/zYyON

English is flexible. Concise writing reads faster.

> Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to write very quickly, and English is written long.

Stenography is where it was at! My mom's second husband was working at the local parliament and had to take notes, in real time, about what politicians were saying and he'd use stenography. He'd then hand his "stenographed" notes to a secretary that'd convert them back to english, which he'd then proofread.

It was french btw, which is even longer than english (about 20% longer).

Another one is Teeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand

I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!

I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.

I have some experience with a German shorthand style (DEK) and it is more important to write clearly. Shorthand removes most of the redundant information that is present in regular alphabets and words. With regular writing, a small error somewhere can be error corrected using the surrounding context. When I wasn't being careful, I could often read the text shortly after I wrote it, but after a few hours or days it became illegible to me.

There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly).

Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that. One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.

If you want to optimize for legibility rather than speed, a fountain pen with a stub nib might help. Stub nibs are designed to make handwriting look a bit like classic cursive with no effort from the person. But they can also improve handwriting legibility by providing a particular feedback, basically, it stops some bad movements you hand might be doing.

I have most success with nibs which are very smooth but stubby. TWSBI Diamond 580 with 1.1 mm stub nib worked best for me, but it takes bottled ink.

I have found my cursive hand getting much better after spending some time with Gregg shorthand.

The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.

For pure legibility, abandon cursive and shorthand of all forms. Learn technical lettering, and then relax it a little.

I use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am getting better though.

My mother-in-law was taught shorthand in the 1960s UK and still uses it regularly. We work together in a family business and any meetings we go to she'll jot notes down using it, the amazing thing [to me anyway] is that she can read it afterwards!

It's a fantastic skill but so rare to see these days, it was mainly used by secretaries dictating notes to then type up I think. Now we are our own typists, it's largely relegated to history.

I keep a handwritten journal. I definitely do not use it.

Imagine the rennessaince in shorthand if this became a thing. It feels like the best of both worlds (writing and typing).

Just for context, the word "Graffiti" is talking about the proprietary single-stroke writing system from Palm, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

During the time I had a Pilot and even for a few years afterwards, I would find myself writing Graffiti glyphs on paper as mentally that's how letters were written!

Graffiti!

It's meant to be decoded into regular text later. Main usage is taking notes or dictation.

Trying to write as fast as an average person speaks makes it very hard to do anything else, like be an attentive conversation partner, but scribbling some notes down in shorthand so you can return to them later is really useful.

Orthic has a much greater economy of strokes, so it's as much about convenience as it is about speed. That is, you can write quite quickly without actually rushing.

It also does not take long to learn because many of the consonants are simplified versions of ordinary letters (such as 'C', 'G', 'b', 'n', 'm' and so on), whereas the vowels are just lines.

And so I don't think your recommended strategy would pay off.

It’s legible to those who know it.

Writing fast with the English alphabet puts a strain on one's hand. You won't feel it unless you already have hand issues. You can keep adjusting how you grip the pen to improve things, but there is a baseline limit due to the orthography.

I'm still salty that there's no FITALY[1] equivalent for iOS. MessageEase[2] has the same kind of idea but is nowhere near as easy to learn and use. I could whip through text at great(ish) speed on my Palms and PocketPCs using FITALY...

[1] https://textware.com/fitaly/ofkey.htm

[2] https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

While it’s nice (nowadays, many keyboards actually support "swiping), it still gets so much wrong, and accuracy plummets for bilingual writing (For myself, I decided that the annoyance of getting nothing right because I’m in the wrong language is better than introducing more subtle errors). For those reasons, I still wish there were phones with full physical keyboards.

Isn't there a theory that writing medium effects scripts? IE the angles of Runes lended themselves well to carving. And something about left-to-right scripts was to avoid smudging.

So I wonder the writing medium Arabic was for. Roman Alphabet does lend itself reasonably well to stone work I feel.

Or is that one of those linguistic myths that doesn't play out like that.

If you haven't seen it one of the many dozen times it's been here, Plover - Open Steno Project https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/, allows machine stenography (write a letter, syllable, word, or phrase with one chorded stroke) on your phone or computer.

It's definitely faster, but it's a steep learning curve.

For a slightly easier learning curve, I suggest ASETNIOP - https://asetniop.com/. The are/were keyboards built with a single row (maybe + thumb keys) that speak ASETNIOP, but I can't seem to find any at the moment.