SHORTHAND WRITING 



5359 



SHORTHAND WRITING 



shorter time? The question has been answered 

 by many authors ; some of these have produced 

 excellent systems, comparing well in working 

 features with the older ones, but many have 

 disappointed themselves and the public. 



To meet the demand for systems easier to 

 learn yet which should be practical, many peo- 

 ple have labored. Some have declared that 

 they have perfected systems that can be mas- 



PITMANIC CONSONANTS 



tered in thirty days, or less; the statements 

 have not been fraudulent, but the results of- 

 fered have been so brief and so lacking in the 

 possibility of expansion that the students who 

 have mastered their details have found the 

 doors to efficiency and to expertness closed by 

 their very limitations. 



Among the non-Pitmanic systems the one 

 which has been most successful and is on an 

 enduring and popular basis is the Gregg, the 

 invention of John Robert Gregg, formerly an 

 Englishman. When he introduced it into 



America he was living in Boston; later he 

 moved to Chicago, where permanent head- 

 quarters were established. The Cross Eclectic 

 Shorthand, another candidate for favor, was 

 devised by J. George Cross; it met with tem- 

 porary success, but was found too complicated 

 to be widely adopted. Other systems which 

 have bid for favor are the Dement, the Pernin, 

 Longley's Takigraphy, the McKee and the 

 Scovell. A list of many still less important 

 might be printed, for it is known that no fewer 

 than 1,070 works on shorthand writing have 

 been printed in the English language. 



Inasmuch as the school that teaches a system 

 not the Gregg or one of the four leading Pit- 

 manic systems is a most unusual exception, 

 this review confines its descriptive paragraphs 

 to these two leaders in the shorthand world. 



Pitmanic Shorthand. The Pitmanic systems 

 derive their characters from parts of the cir- 

 cumference and the. radii of a circle. There 

 are only twenty-four sounds which it is found 

 necessary to represent, but there are twenty-six 

 characters, for r and h have two characters 

 each, used at will. Light and heavy dots and 

 dashes represent the vowels. When a person 

 has learned these characters and the vowels and 

 their positions he can write shorthand, slowly, 

 it is true, and clumsily, for at that point he 

 really begins to master the true art of his sub- 

 ject. There are hundreds of characters formed 

 from consonant combinations which represent 

 words; these are not always arbitrarily fixed, 

 for in the signs and combinations are usually 

 suggestions of the word or words which the 

 signs represent. 



Either t or d may be added to a great many 

 words by making their consonant signs half 

 length, as pay, paid; this is convenient for the 

 past tense, but it is more often employed in 

 forming words ending in t or d. Thus act is 

 written with the half-length sign for k, etc. 

 Doubling the length of a consonant stroke adds 

 the syllable thr. 



What are called initial and final hooks are 

 ingeniously employed. The hook is essentially 

 a half circle attached to the beginning or to the 

 end of a consonant stroke. 



A small circle at the beginning or at the 

 end of a consonant stroke adds the sound of s; 

 a circle double the size adds the sound ses. 

 A short enclosed loop attached to a consonant 

 adds st ; a loop twice as long adds str. There 

 are further modifications of the circle, hook 

 and loop which with a single brief stroke of 

 the pen add frequently-recurring syllables. 



