Learning Gregg Shorthand
Writing about how I discovered the world of shorthand writing systems, and taking you through my process of learning Gregg Shorthand! 2021-05-04
Discovering Shorthand Systems
Yesterday, I stubled upon the following video from Artifexian:
In this video of his, Artifexian talks about choosing a type of script, a writing medium and a set of orthographic rules to create an interesting writing system for conlangs. At 3:25, mentions the following very briefly:
But what happens to a cursive script when speed is the most important factor?
As he does, he shows the following picture for only a few short seconds:
As soon as I saw this script, I was amazed at how awesome it looked. I knew had to research this shorthand mystery futher, and so that's exactly what I did.
What is Shorthand?
At this point, you are probably wondering what shorthand even is. Here is a very nice definition of it:
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography [...].
Essentially, shorthand systems allow the writer to write at a ridiculously fast speed when compared to traditionnal longhand systems like the roman alphabet. After some more research, I stumbled upon a system called Gregg Shorthand, which seemed to be one of the most popular among writers. For the next few days, I went on and learned how to write in Gregg.
Learning Gregg Shorthand
Learning basic Gregg Shorthand was surprisingly easy. Here is a list of the video lessons I took in order to learn basic Gregg:
- Learn Gregg Shorthand (Full Course), episodes
0 - 10 - Gregg shorthand for personal note taking, lessons
1.1,1.2,3, 4, 5
And here is a list of the written material I used to do so, linked in Google Drive link in this video's description:
- Gregg Manual, for learning the alphabet along with very simple words
- Gregg Dictionnary, for abbreviations on longer words
- Gregg Manual and its answer key, for writing short phrases more efficiently
What I Managed to Achieve
After a complete day of learning, I managed to memorize all the letters of the Gregg Alphabet and a few short phrases such as the, is, I will be, and so on. I write at about four words per minute, but I know I will get better as time goes on. Here is a picture of a Wikipedia article I transcribed in Gregg, followed by its translation back into the roman alphabet:
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I will very likely continue using Gregg for a lot of everyday tasks, such as personnal notes and TODO lists. Even though I will never be able to write at hundreds of words per minute, I really love how cryptic this script looks and how impressive a fluent writer can be.