Shorthand | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Shorthand

Greek inscriptions indicate that as early as the fourth century B.C. people have used abbreviated script in an attempt to keep pace with the speed of speech (140 words per minute, on average). The first known organized system of shorthand writing, or stenography, emerged around 50 B.C. and is attributed to the Roman freedman Marcus Tullius Tiro (born ca. first century B.C.), a secretary to the orator Cicero (106-43 B.C.). The Tironian method, which employed brief strokes to represent the characters of the alphabet, was taught in schools and used to record speeches throughout the Roman era and the early Christian period; another system was devised by Roman writer and philosopher Seneca (ca. 4 B.C.-ca. 65 A.D.). During the early Middle Ages, however, shorthand became associated with witchcraft and fell into disuse.

It was not until 1588 that shorthand was revived by English clergyman Timothy Bright (1551?-1615), in his Characterie: an Art of Short, Swift, and Secret Writing by Character. Bright's system was followed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a number of shorthand methods, none of which established widespread dominance. Seventeenth-century English author Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) wrote his famous literary diary in shorthand; the secrecy of the method is thought to have helped him to record personal anecdotes that he might otherwise have excluded for fear of discovery. The systems introduced during this period, while undeniably faster than longhand writing, were flawed by their complexity and overabundance of symbols, which made them relatively slow and difficult to learn.

Phonetic stenography, introduced by William Tiffin in the mid-eighteenth century, was a significant step in making stenography faster. Earlier systems were alphabetic, employing symbols to stand for letters; Tiffin's system employed symbols that stand for sounds, enabling the stenographer to transcribe a word using fewer strokes. A number of competing variations again followed on Tiffin's innovation; it was not until 1837, when Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897), an English educator, published Stenographic Sound--Hand, that a single dominant English stenographic system arose. Pitman, who had learned a phonetic system developed by stenographer Samuel Taylor, was the first to develop a shorthand system based on scientific analysis of the sounds that comprise speech.

In the Pitman system, each consonant sound has its own symbol, though similar sounds, such as p and b, are distinguished only by shading; vowel sounds are indicated by dots and dashes placed near the consonant strokes. The system, like most major shorthand systems, also employs short forms, symbols for commonly used words and phrases; the Pitman system contains 214 such symbols. Its relative speed and accessibility quickly made it the preeminent shorthand system in the English-speaking world (it remains the standard system in Great Britain), and it was adapted for many European languages as well. In 1888 American educator John Robert Gregg (1867-1948) introduced a rival system in his book. Also a phonetic system, Gregg shorthand distinguishes similar-sounding consonants by length rather than shading; the result is a script that flows much like longhand. Gregg's system eventually became the dominant method in the United States, where Pitman shorthand had not caught on as quickly as in Europe.

In 1949 the Gregg system was revised to reduce the number of short forms used from several hundred to 184. Owing to the phonetic approaches of the Gregg and Pitman methods, today's stenographers can match and even surpass the rate of speech; speeds of over 280 words per minute have been recorded. Systems introduced in the twentieth century are generally simpler and easier to learn than the Gregg and Pitman methods, but they are also slower. Despite competition from typewriter-like stenography machines now used in recording court proceedings, the two nineteenth-century systems still dominate manual stenography. However, with the advent of the personal computer and voice-activated input systems, many managers and executives are finding it easier to do their own typing, and shorthand may be a dying art, used primarily by reporters when taking notes during interviews.