Shorthand

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing compared with longhand ¹. The practice of writing it is called stenography. A typical system gives symbols or abbreviations for words and common phrases, which allows a well-trained writer to write about as fast as people speak.

Pitman and Gregg are the names most readers meet

Isaac Pitman published Stenographic Sound-Hand in 1837, introducing Pitman shorthand ². Pitman's system is phonetic: it writes sounds rather than spellings. John Robert Gregg's system followed in 1888. In the United States and some other parts of the world, Gregg shorthand largely superseded Pitman ³.

These two names are the ones that appear in the history of dictation, which traces how speech was captured before recording and speech recognition arrived.

Shorthand speed is a measured skill

Writing speed is the reason shorthand exists, and tests set it as a number. Speaking speed is the benchmark: normal speech runs at about 125 to 150 words per minute ⁴. The table below sets three documented benchmarks side by side.

The Goa rule applies to one government recruitment, and other bodies set different speeds. The NCRA figure is for stenotype machine shorthand, the modern successor to pen shorthand, and it is a professional certification standard rather than a typical writing speed.

Shorthand is the ancestor of later dictation methods

Shorthand was how the spoken word was captured before recording machines were common. The novelist Mark Twain began almost daily dictations to a stenographer in January 1906 ⁷. That is the workflow that the Dictaphone later replaced with a recording, and that speech recognition later replaced with software.

Shorthand is still relevant. Court reporting relies on fast stenotype writing, and voice writing is a newer method used in some of the same settings. Both aim to turn speech into a verbatim record.

Why shorthand matters for dictation

Shorthand shows the limit of the human writing hand. Writing by hand is slower than speaking, and the methods above exist to close that gap. Modern dictation closes the same gap differently: the speaker talks at normal pace and the software writes.

For a comparison of speaking and typing speeds, read our guide to dictation versus typing. For the older tools of the trade, the dictation machines guide covers the hardware that stenographers and typists used alongside shorthand.

Related terms

• Dictaphone: the recording machine that took over the job of capturing speech.
• Voice writing: a modern method that repeats speech into a recognizer.
• Digital dictation: the file-based workflow that followed.