I am an avid keeper of a daily journal. I love to write in it. While writing in it last night, I thought of a cool idea: write entries in a code, so nobody but you could decifer it (at least without any major de-crypting work).
So, I searched the internet on various forms of shorthand (it would have to be an efficient method to make it realistic). I found some good information, and the one system that seems to be the most easiest to learn is Handywrite. I started to look this method over. Then I got to thinking again…
I want this system to be my very own. Maybe someone who happens to read my journal will recognize that it is Handywrite. Then again, that is probably pretty doubtful. I don’t want to settle for just changing the Handywrite symbols around to my own to make it “my own”.
Any input?
If this post made no sense, think Da Vinci note taking style… :dubious:
Any code you can invent yourself and use consistently can broken by a determined person.
Most any code at all will deter would-be readers.
Seems to me that you should go with something that seems cool to you and is reasonably easy to remember.
Handywrite seems simple to learn, but it relies a lot on good handwriting because stroke length and circle size change meaning.
Other possibilities are Shavian or Quickscript, which you might already have encountered. The strokes seem easier (to me) to write and read back than Handywrite. But I haven’t practiced enough with any shorthand notation to really know.
I agree with awldune though: encryption based merely on use of an unusual writing system isn’t really dependable. You’d be better of keeping your journal on a computer and using its encryption software (or encryption services in the operating system), if you really want to ensure your thoughts are private.
If you’re just trying to keep this from the prying eyes of your average person (say parents, or siblings), you don’t need some fancy encryption software.
One way is to create your own writing system. It’s an easy process, unless you try to go Chinese style. Something in the style of Tolkien’s alphabets would be a bit too easy to decipher (since each letter has the same form for related sounds, but turned to indicate the differences, pretty much). You could create a consonantal alphabet like Arabic or Hebrew and 'mt vwls lk ths, which would make it harder to decipher.
Hypothetically speaking, inventing your own language for journal keeping purposes would really make it hard to decipher. Using both a language and writing system of your own invention would make it nearly impossible for anyone to decipher unless they ahd some sort of “rosetta stone” to go by (which is why most documents we have in extinct scripts where we don’t know what language is being used are nearly impossible to decipher, from what I understand)
If you do create your own writing system for this, keep it to yourself and don’t share it, because obviously, you’ll ruin the goal of it if you do share :).
omniglot.com has some ideas of where people have gone with writing systems.