Smith Shorthand

2024-10-05

In late 2019, I wrote about a new shorthand system I was designing. Less than six months later it was in the bin, neither fully developed, nor learned, nor used. Instead I embarked on four-or-so happy years of consistent use of Henry Sweet’s Current Phonetic Shorthand, which was my regular choice for any and all note-taking.

A few times over that period I tried to learn Oliver’s Stenoscript, purely for fun: there were a few qualities it had that weren’t present in Current and which I wanted to try my hand at.

Stenoscript never stuck. There are some things I like about it but I find it basically too fiddly: there are too many distinctions that are meaningful in its signal space but far too fine for me to comfortably make when writing by hand.

Designing a shorthand, or a writing system of any kind, is quite like designing a programming language, in this way. The trick is to encode your signal as densely as possible—but not denser, as the adage goes. It’s trivial to make up maximally efficient encoding systems; but a shorthand needs to be simple and regular enough to be learned by heart, it needs to be made up of strokes that are comfortable for the human hand to write, and it needs not to be so densely encoded that natural variations and discrepencies result in dramatically different meanings.

Nevertheless, I conceived the certainly counterproductive idea to once again design my own shorthand—this time inspired by those parts of Stenoscript that I did like.

And this time I had rather more experience under my belt; Current and Stenoscript are far more extensive and expressive than Forkner, and the new system would be directly informed by what had worked for me and what hadn’t in those systems.

I’ve been at this for about two months. I have completely cannibalized my acquaintance with Current: I no longer really remember it, nor am I nearly as quick in the new system as I was in the previous. Nevertheless, there’s the pleasure of creation.

It would be absurd to claim that my new system is some kind of improvement over what exists, or even what I already knew. I would have been perfectly fine with what I already knew, and anyone who wants to take notes quickly by hand would be just as well-suited by what’s already known and practiced. But this is a well-designed system, I think, in that I was able to take those qualities that I wanted to explore and build something effective, attractive, well-structured and balanced around them. So it’s an aesthetic success. As an artwork (however limited its appeal might be), it’s a success.

Enough of a success that I’ve put my own name on it: I call it Smith Shorthand.