Pitman's Snippets

The books that you have been learning from contain neat, tidy, drawn shorthand, and my own offerings, in this blog and my main website, also aim to present shorthand in a form that you can confidently copy. Once you have gained some experience, you will increasingly find that shorthand can be written in a more flowing and cursive manner, and still be read back with ease. There is less room for manoeuvre than with longhand, as you cannot slope the strokes or change their relative length without changing their meaning, but real written shorthand is unlikely to match the perfection of form found in the books, at least when written at a reasonable speed. 

As an introduction to more scribbled shorthand, I would like to invite you to visit my new BlogSpot called Pitman's Snippets, where I am posting bits and pieces of rough-and-ready shorthand. You will have to use all your shorthand knowledge to read them, as there is no longhand key provided. This is exactly how real life shorthand is - your shorthand notes are the only thing that you have (unless you have also made a sound recording) and you must rely on that and read back without anyone helping you with the difficult or questionable parts. With the snippets blog you can improve your abilities in this area, without any hassle or stress, and can treat it as a game. When you are "up against it" in producing a transcript for your employer or in a exam, in the face of outlines refusing to yield themselves to being deciphered, you will, I hope, have gained some extra confidence in your ability to complete the task or assignment.

pitmans-snippets.blogspot.co.uk

Although the shorthand in the snippets is less than neat, I can assure you that all the outlines are dictionary correct. A few vowel signs are included to help with the reading but if these notes were for myself, I would probably leave them out, and your own notes also will have vowel signs only where you need them. All the items have a brief caption, to make them accessible via the search box. Some of the snippets will be wilder and messier than others, and I hope you enjoy the challenge of reading them. The absence of longhand for checking will make your successes in reading even more valuable, as you will know that you have achieved complete reading accuracy all on your own. (406 words)