One of the topics I’ve been researching lately is shorthand. The narrator of my work-in-progress briefly attends a secretarial college in 1939, so I needed to know what she’d learn there. Shorthand, I figured – but then I found out there were all kinds of shorthand. Wikipedia alone lists forty-one different types. The only one I’d ever heard of was Pitman shorthand, so I started with that, and it was absolutely fascinating. It was brought to Australia by Jacob Pitman, now buried in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery under a phonetically-inscribed tombstone that states he ‘INTRODIUST FONETIK SHORTHAND’. Apparently Pitman was also used in the United States at the trial of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination plotters. Back before digital audio recorders and voice recognition software, Pitman was the most common way of writing English down quickly, reaching speeds of up to 350 words per minute.
How does it work? It uses very simple symbols to represent sounds and common groups of sounds. Then it speeds things up even more by allowing you to omit vowels and by providing symbols for commonly occurring words. I came across a very nifty website called Pitman for Geeks that explains how proper Pitman shorthand works, then gives step-by-step instructions for learning it the ‘easy’ way. The website author admits that ‘a Pitman teacher would be appalled at the look of it, but as there aren’t many Pitman teachers in the world today, the risk is not high’. Even though I have no reason whatsoever to learn shorthand, this website almost tempted me to try teaching it to myself.
Needless to say, only about one-thousandth of all this information on shorthand made it into my manuscript. Still, I had fun reading about it.