Since our last post about shorthand writing (or phonography), we have found a letter pubished three months later which very strongly disputes the usefulness of the system. However, we now have the benefit of nearly two hundred years of knowledge and many people who use Sir Isaac Pitman’s method find it most useful, quick and easy to use. Once practised enough, it is very easy to master writing and reading the thin/thick strokes and heavy/light dots. So this piece sounds like either sour grapes or a student complaining about a system he or she cannot be bothered to learn properly.
Of course, there are many different shorthand systems in use now and also many other electronic options available to record the spoken word. But the journalists at the Stamford Mercury still stick to their spiral-bound notebooks.
“Pitman’s Phonography is distinguished only forits (sic) fine sounding-name, its unusual paretension, and its being, with all its boasted originality, based on an idea first broached by another, Dr. Arnott, in his elements of Physics. The combinations of the characters used in Phonography are often extremely awkward and unsightly; and the subtle distinction of thick strokes and thin, heavy and light dots, of whole and half-sized characters, however pleasing to an amateur, is a kind of nicety which it is impossible to produce in the hurry of reporting. Yet this distinction pervades the whole system of Phonography; and if not unerringly pursued, the labour of hours is converted into an unmeaning scrawl. – From the Student, or Young Man’s Advocate.“
The Stamford Mercury, 2nd, May 1845.