Introduction

This document describes a new shorthand designed for rapidly writing English by hand. In particular, it seeks a balance of attributes to encourage rapid but comfortable writing, and writing that doesn’t demand overmuch precision and fine motor control. To that end, it

• Is phonetic: it encodes sounds, not written letters;
• Is cursive: it tries to employ the most primitive elements of ordinary cursive handwriting;
• Is regular: it fills the basic space of those primitives in a way that’s as systematic as practical, in an effort to minimize the number of distinct forms and to make it easy to learn and remember;
• Uses both light and dark strokes of the pen or pencil, though it tries to keep the need for dark strokes to a minimum;
• Seeks not to encode too much difference in very fine distinctions; there should be a relatively forgiving range of realizations of the forms;
• Tries to roughly vertically follow the line of writing, but does not aim for horizontal compression.

Consonants

Core

The core of this shorthand is a phonetic system based around a systematic treatment of the downstroke: ****if we have three ways of entering a stroke—by making a sharp angle, by making a curving angle, and by making a loop—and then those same three ways of exiting a stroke, we are left with 9 ways to write that stroke.

We can then define 4 heights: short (or x-height), tall (or cap-height), low (the height of a lowercase letter with a descender), and full (a stroke that goes from the top of a capital letter to the bottom of a descender).

4 heights times 9 strokes produces 36 core signs.

Finally, we can write each downstroke either light or dark.

We will default to light strokes and use dark strokes to indicate voicing: the stroke for p, when written dark, is read as b, and so on.

It’s important to note, however, that a downstroke isn’t the same as a straight line; it will often be more comfortable to write certain strokes as loops.

The short signs form the core consonant inventory, and the jumping-off point for the rest of the system.

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<aside> 💡 The core signs are arranged roughly systematically, where the entering angle corresponds to a particular area of the table, as laid out in spatially by sound. Here the signs are colored by which of the three entering styles they have.