My mother used Pitman shorthand, after being many years in retirement she said she probably couldn’t remember all the symbols (of which there are many in Pitman) by then. She still used it occasionally - I find lists in her writing around the place.
Then came PC’s…
I recall the days when anyone above the level of supervisor had a secretary. Most of them had never had to touch an actual keyboard. But with selectric typewriters, you could type really fast and there was no key-jamming…
Then came PC’s, and a lot of lesser superintendants lost their secretary to MBA cost-cutting and the (word processing) typing pool. AS PC’s got into more and more levels of jobs, eventually the typing pool faded away because everyone could type their own memos and emails. (Or else!..)
It was a big deal when the president of the division was promoted, a younger type who used spreadsheets and was comfortable with computers, emails, and print formatting. His secretary became more administrrative assistant and less typist.
Progress… I’m humming Video Killed the Radio Star.
I am with you. I have been using Obsidian for the past couple of years and it makes me happy. So happy that I was blathering on about how awesome it is for a paragraph or two here, but I realized that was not necessary.
Nevertheless, it really does provide a great way to take notes, allowing me to instantly create new pages in a wiki-like fashion, for details on application X or technology Y and so on.
I wish I had apps like this in college.
Agreed. The possibilities are really about endless with a set of tools (really) that Obsidian makes possible.
It makes me shudder in horror thinking just back over the past…five years, say…and all of the stuff in my fancy shorthand-esque handwriting I probably will never get around to finding again.
Much less categorizing, labeling, and generally making use of. Would have been very handy.
ANYWAY trying to avoid too much of a hijack…the topic of shorthand in general goes back way before Gregg’s system, or any other. I believe there are numerous authors of Germanic or Austrian descent who left behind many tens of thousands of pages of manuscript in a kind of shorthand of their own design.
Probably based on some pre-existing system, but I seem to recall it being the sole province of a handful (if that) of specialists to decipher such texts.
It is boggling how much one strives to simplify and succeeds, in many cases, only in order to leave behind a jungle of text.
So, short answer: “No… I tried half-assedly to learn Gregg’s system when I was ten or eleven or so, and regret I did not master the technique. It would have been neat to have learned if only for bragging rights today, but one survives!”
Ahem…links? Ahem. 
Perhaps you and I are expected to take our own notes and type our own documents ,* but are wheels really supposed to do so? But the total demand for such secretarial skills is way down, of course.
*I know someone who could not be bothered to learn how to type, could barely send an e-mail, and it was indeed a real problem for him!
Sorry, I meant that I wrote some lengthy prose about the amazing and awesome Obsidian app…then I deleted my words when I realized I probably had crossed over to a proper hijack.
Starting in the 70s and well into the 80s I knew someone who insisted no manager or higher level employee would ever type anything into a typewriter of computer. Nice guy, but that was typical of the sort of things he was wrong about.
70s and well into the 80s you say?
In the early 2000s my employer acquired a struggling competitor, and I was one of the people “parachuted in” to the acquired business to work on the integration.
There were a number of “executives” (over 100) who had Personal Assistants, Administrative Assistants or Executive Assistants. The bosses did not touch a computer.
The PAs/AAs/EAs did shorthand and “typing”, the latter covered everything involving a computer.
They had email but the Assistants printed out their bosses’ email and gave it to them every morning. The bosses with hand wrote or dictated responses to those emails. The Admins then went into the email system (Lotus Notes) and responded to the emails. Turnaround time for an email was 2-3 days.
I felt like I had walked into a time warp back to the 1970s.
First we got rid of 80% of the Assistants. A whole bunch of their bosses then opted for early retirement (most of them were in their 40s and 50s, they had a pension plan that gave you a full pension when your tenure + age = 80)
Apparently there is a Facebook group of these folks still complaining about how we destroyed the culture of their company. They were going out of business anyway but because information was so tightly controlled, very few people outside the boardroom and the controller’s office had any idea.
A number of the people made redundant there ended up working in government jobs. My PA became a secretary at a public school.
My first full-time job, at age 18, was as a secretary for a government insurance company. In virtually every work committee or volunteer organization I’ve joined since then, I’ve served as the secretary. All this secretarial work means lots of meeting minutes. I’ve probably produced thousands of pages of them in my life… but never in shorthand. I’ve found that I type fast enough (90 to 100 wpm with Dvorak) that I can comfortably produce a verbatim transcript for all but the most blustery speakers. (Yes, people can and do talk a lot faster than 90 wpm, but in the spontaneous speech of meetings, the utterances are filled with hesitations and pauses, allowing a skilled typist with adequate memory plenty of time to catch up.)
Of course, verbatim transcripts are rarely what people want in meeting minutes, which makes the job even easier. I just need to listen for the salient points and summarize them on the fly. It’s only things like motions that are voted on where the wording needs to be preserved exactly, though the trickier ones are often submitted in writing in the first place.
The whole thing has become almost second nature to me, and I can even sort of do this in a second language. I used to work at a German university, and was regularly assigned to take minutes of meetings conducted in German. I found I wasn’t proficient enough in the language to summarize German to German in real time, but what I could do was listen to the German speakers and summarize what they said in English. The participants were usually surprised when they got their minutes in English, and may have grumbled a bit, but were generally happy that the discussion and decisions were otherwise accurately recorded, and that they got this record within a few minutes of the meeting’s end.
Well, he was retired by the 90s. I know there were plenty people out in the world with that attitude, but as you describe, the survival rate was low.
Nice avatar / post combo!
As an interpreter I have developed a personal kind of shorthand for consecutive interpreting, as have all colleagues. It has a couple of basics most of us have in common (α for instance is “work”, based on the German term “Arbeit”, αr becomes a “worker”, αft is work force (Arbeiterschaft), a square is “country”, a square with an embeded m a “member state”, a capital I with a wiggle on top like smoke “industry”… etc., etc.) and then whatever we develop as the need arises, depending on the subject. It takes some practice, but it is fun and useful. The most important bits are the logical connections, like “but”, “despite of”, “therefore”… find something for those in advance! For long words it is often enough to write down the first and the last syllable, or, as has been said, leave out vocals. What psychonaut did in German universities was quite good, by the description of it. Kudos!
It would be mostly incomprehensible for anyone else, but it only has to work for me, and only for a couple of minutes until I have repeated the content to the clients.
This, too, is a dying art.
At my company, we often refer back to (now-scanned) handwritten notes and calculations on old-timey graph paper. It’s kind of cool to see some of this historic stuff, including policy/decision manuscripts written out first before they were typed up for publication later.
I’m kind of intrigued by this Obsidian program, for personal use.
Tripler
I"m going to look into Gregg too. . .
Obsidian is free for personal use (it’s not free software, though, afaik)
All the Gregg stuff is available online, but it is a practice-makes-perfect, use-it-or-lose-it type of skill.
meeting minutes - isn’t that done mostly by AI today?
I spend a good amount in misc. meetings and I see ever more AI-meeting-resumé-bots creeping in …
they tend to be good to very good (but not excellent yet)
so that should be the final nail in the coffin of shorthand, which i had to learn in the mid 80ies in school
That is correct. But the yearly license for commercial use is a quite reasonable $50. They define commercial very broadly–pretty much, if you are using it at work, it’s commercial use. So I pony up the $50 every year and smile, because I rely on this application every single day.
And if they suddenly bump that up to $500 per year, one of the main features of Obsidian is that all of your files are in standard Markdown format, which can be read in any text editor and can be ported to many other tools.
I use it for what others in my group use OneNote for.
Is it? I’ve been in meetings where AI bots recorded a verbatim transcript, but I’ve yet to see one prepare actual meeting minutes in the style of a secretary, where the document has a meaningful title indicating the purpose and date of the meeting, a list of attendees and apologies, a hierarchical structure that follows the agenda (possibly with some items shuffled around), succinct summaries of discussions rather than a complete record of every word, conspicuous formatting for motions and their votes and possibly divisions (and potentially multiple passing or failing amendments), notes of when latecomers arrived or participants left early, etc. Can AI do any of this yet?
probably depends on how “tailor made” you need your minutes … but for pretty avg. online meeting minutes, tactiq is your friend, incl. summaries, action points, etc…
as so many things AI, it gets the stuff 90% right … which for me is good enough after a glance-over.