Check out these weird symbols (they help you type faster)

We often believe that “reporting and annotating” is easy these days. It is possible not only to record an audio or a video, but also to share the presentations on any topic online. It makes you wonder: how did people survive before, when they had to write everything down using pen and paper? But the story is surprising as many of them had their own writing system to make taking notes even easier.

we, from awesome.club, we love writing and we certainly love writers. That’s why we’re sharing this interesting story about how the art of reporting and note-taking has developed and changed over the years.

You may have heard of the use of shorthand to write. This writing system is a general term that defines any abbreviated or symbolic method of writing, with the aim of increasing its speed. Here is an example of what this method looks like, developed by John Robert Gregg in his book Gregg Shorthand: A Light-Line Phonography for the Millionin free translation).

These images may resemble hieroglyphics at first, but they are not as complicated as they seem. Gregg’s idea was to use symbols that represented sounds rather than traditional letters, reducing them to the simplest forms. This came in handy as letters can “emit” more than one sound. For example, a “K” sound was used for both “hard C” and the letter “K.”

The length can change the sound of each symbol represented. A diagonal line that spanned a small space produced the “T” sound, but the longer line turned it into a “D” sound. To make things even simpler, some words in common use, like “this” (it), “the” (the), “para” (for), also had their own symbols. The system proved to be very effective.

Once a person learned to use this system, he could write about 280 words per minute! Remember that the average person speaks at 125 to 150 words per minute. As you can imagine, writing using shorthand became an integral part of many careers where note-taking was important, such as legal, medical and secretarial jobs.

What do you do to make note-taking easier? Please share your methods with our team in the comments!