Personal Shorthand

I made my own shorthand!

why do this?

I've been taking a lot of physical notes recently, so I did some research into shorthand -- there are many existing shorthand systems designed to maximize writing/transcription speed. The existing systems are very fucking cool, but I found them to be pretty difficult to read.

So I made my own! It is focused on using fewer strokes-per-letter. I'm still getting used to it, but it's been fun to use.

without further ado

Here's the conversion chart

chart showing the conversion from regular letters to shorthand

...and here's what it looks like in practice...

example of the shorthand Quote from Herman Hesse's SteppenWolf: "To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them, too, however, the other thought has come, that man is not merely a half-rational animal, but a child of the gods and destined to immortality."

I've always written in small-caps, so the shorthand version of my handwriting reduces every letter to a single stroke. It doesn't save much in terms of small pen movements, but it's still something.

Here's the above example again with the missing letter pieces added back in (in red):

shorthand example with extra lines to show it is just abbreviated letters

That's all, folks!

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