If you hunt around on archive.org, or Google Books, you’ll come across public domain versions of various old Pitman books which cover earlier versions of the system. It’s tempting to learn from one of these free books, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Pitman was gradually refined over the years, and using an old version is like running old software when a newer, less buggy version is available. It’s free, but it’s not worth the extra time it will cost you.

There are two modern versions of Pitman – Pitman New Era, which has been around since 1922, and Pitman 2000 which, came out in 1975, when saying “the year 2000″ still sounded futuristic. You might think Pitman 2000, being the newer system, would be the better one, but it’s not that simple.

Pitman New Era is harder to learn, but it is FAST. It evolved as a more streamlined, more consistent version of the Pitman system used in the 1800s. (In fact, if you can read New Era, it’s not too difficult to read the old versions too.) New Era was designed for court and parliamentary reporting, situations where the reporter had to quietly write down very rapid dialogue. Reporters couldn’t stop the speaker and say “Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?” They had to get it the first, and only time. The system is capable of extremely high speeds (over 200 wpm), but the “memory load” of the system is heavy – there are hundreds of special shortcut words and phrases (“grammalogues”) which must be learned. The grammalogues are only a little briefer than the way the words would be written by following the rules, but since these shortcuts represent 60-70% of everyday English, the cumulative saving in time is significant.

Pitman 2000 was designed to meet a different need – ease of learning. By the 1970s, shorthand was mainly being used by secretaries to take dictation, a situation where someone would typically be speaking fairly slowly. Better still, your boss would could repeat a phrase if you asked politely, so that very high speeds weren’t as important. The Pitman people figured they could slash the learning time by cutting hundreds of special rules and symbols that were only used in a few cases. About 70% of the words which had to be memorized as “short forms” or “grammalogues” in New Era are written out in full in Pitman 2000, and a simpler (but longer) system is used for verb endings like “-ed” and “-ing”. The number of rules and exceptions to rules is greatly reduced. Pitman 2000 also gets rid of the heavy dot, which New Era used to distinguish between short and long vowels. Its designers estimated that Pitman 2000 was faster to learn, and still capable of speeds up to 140 words per minute.

Unlike previous incarnations of Ptiman, Pitman 2000 wasn’t intended to replace the system that came before it, and New Era stayed in print. Those who wanted a “lite” shorthand for occasional office use learned Pitman 2000. Those who wanted the highest speed learned New Era.

Which should you learn? It’s a no-brainer – New Era! Both systems will take you time and effort to learn, but Pitman New Era is capable of twice the speed. Plus, New Era lets you precisely record almost any sound you can say, but, because Pitman 2000 kills off some vowels, it loses the ability to write the full range of sounds.

Most modern fountain pens have fairly stiff nibs. They bend slightly when you press down on them, which makes the writing more comfortable, but the nib doesn’t widen much. On the Steno, the extra-fine steel nib is flexible enough to allow very thin lines, as well as thick ones. That should be perfect for Pitman.

Pelikan is a well known and respected German pen manufacturer. Their high-end offerings have beautiful gold nibs, and are consistent favourites with fountain pen enthusiasts. The Steno is not one of those. It’s a plain, plastic pen, with a low price tag, designed for daily use by students and office workers.

I don’t know if the pen is still in production, but it’s easy to find online for $20-30. I’ve just ordered one , and when I get it, I’ll tell you what it’s like to write with.

In the United States, various authors were publishing their own versions of Pitman’s system, under a wide range of names. To stop this shorthand piracy, and cash in on the US market, Isaac’s brother Benn emigrated to the United States, and taught the system there. The Pitmans made a good living from selling their system, both as correspondence courses, and also as textbooks. Isaac Pitman produced new editions regularly, incorporating new modifications to make his shorthand system faster.

But in 1859, Isaac Pitman made a basic change to his system. The dot vowels had previously been I, E, A, from top to bottom. Pitman decided that the system would be more “natural” if the order were reversed, so, in the tenth edition of his book, he changed it to A, E, I.

Shorthand writers and teachers were livid. They’d spent years learning to write shorthand one way, and now, if they wanted to communicate with others, or read the official books and magazines, they had to relearn one of the most basic elements.

In England, the response from stenographers was, “OK, but this is the last big change we’ll allow.” American writers were less accommodating. Some adopted the new system, but many insisted on keeping things as they were. Isaac’s brother Benn listened to his customers, and produced separate “Benn Pitman” shorthand for America, keeping the old vowel system.

In the meantime, competing “Pitmanic” systems took advantage of the confusion, and started selling their own minor variations, making grand claims for the superior “scientific principles” they used. By the 1880s, American students might learn Benn Pitman, Isaac Pitman, Munson’s Phonography, Graham’s Phonograhy, Lindsley’s Takigrafy. American shorthand was a disorganized mess.

Around 1893, an Irishman named John Robert Gregg emigrated to the United States, where he published a totally new shorthand system. Gregg Shorthand was presented as being much easier to learn than Pitman, and faster to use. And there was only one Gregg system, not dozens. Gregg was the Apple Macintosh of the 19th century shorthand world. (Well, there had to be one.)

Gregg Shorthand has a number of appealing features. More important, it has many more features that sound appealing to the consumer. Like Pitman, Gregg is phonetic. Where Pitman is based on geometrical shapes, Gregg is based on the slope of typical handwriting. Where Pitman has separate vowels and consonants, Gregg flows vowels and consonants together, so the writer doesn’t have to lift the pen in mid-word. And while Pitman depends on thick and thin lines, Gregg is written with the same light stroke. In fact, the official name for Gregg’s system was “Light Line Phonography”.

Gregg Shorthand was a huge success. It arrived in America at the right time, and it was well marketed, as being easy to learn, with fewer rules than Pitman, and no exceptions to those rules. It was supposed to be more natural to write, and every bit as fast as Pitman.

In fact, the differences between the two systems are not as significant as they sound. Gregg doesn’t use light and heavy lines – instead, it uses various lengths of line, which can be just as difficult to distinguish. Vowels in Gregg are drawn as various loops. There are only so many loops you can draw at high speed, and Gregg suffers from a shortage of vowel sounds. Although Pitman vowels are drawn separately, generally as dots and dashes, this is actually one of the advantages of the system, because it means that words can be written quickly without vowels, and the vowels added later if it’s necessary to make the meaning clear. And while, Gregg may not have as many rules as Pitman, it has its own quirky ways of abbreviating long words, which writers must learn case by case.

But the big issue was speed. After all, that’s what shorthand is all about. The fastest system should be the best. Every shorthand publisher of the day made outrageous claims about the maximum speeds attainable with their systems, and produced expert writers who could demonstrate impressive feats of speed-writing.

In 1909, the American National Shorthand Reporters Association launched an annual speed competition. All the contestants in that first competition used Pitman or Pitman-based systems. The readings they had to transcribe, taken from court proceedings, were extremely fast, ranging from 200 to 280 words per minute. But in 1911, one of the entrants was Charles Swem, who used the Gregg system, and proved that it could match Pitman for speed. The Gregg Publishing Company used Swem on its advertisements, and in a few years, Gregg became, and remained, the most popular shorthand system in the US, while the rest of the English-speaking world used Isaac Pitman’s system.

So, was Gregg the winner of the shorthand deathmatch? No. The real winner emerged in 1914, when a group of teenage competitors entered the competition, sponsored by the Universal Stenotype Company, using their newfangled stenotype machine. These upstart kids were able to match the speed of the most experienced and fastest court reporters in America. An expert Pitman writer won the 1914 competition, but only just. Contest organizers were so alarmed by the development that they put an end to the competition for five years. When it returned in 1919, machine stenographers were not allowed to enter. It didn’t matter. The point had been made, and soon stenotypists were replacing shorthand writers in courtrooms across America.

This book, available from Amazon, is one of those “print-on-demand” publications, where the publishers, Kessinger, have taken an old title and brought it back from the dead to sell to a niche market. This one is a reproduction of a Pitman workbook printed in Toronto in 1924. Although the material is old, it does cover the right version of Pitman – that’s Pitman New Era, the final, and fastest version of Pitman, which was invented in 1922, and continued to be used, with only minor changes, until the 1980s.

The publishers’ books on Amazon all have “Copyrighted Material” printed at the top of the sample pages, although most of their books – and perhaps all – have been in the public domain for years.

I don’t own this book, so I can’t comment on the binding. I assume that, unlike most original, used copies you might find, it doesn’t have yellow pages or smell of mothballs and cat pee. That’s a plus.

You can read quite a bit of the content on Amazon, using their “Look Inside” feature. The book has the lengthy openings which are common in those old books. “Prepare yourself thoroughly and diligently, and with the mastery of that art you will be ready for your march ONWARD and UPWARD.”

Indeed.

You get nearly 200 pages of lessons and sample readings. The lessons are pretty much the same as you’ll find in any other Pitman book. The examples are duller. It’s packed with Constructive And Useful Advice for the Young Person.Readings include edifying instructions on “Some Hints of Business Good Manners”, uplifting sermons on “Habits of Work”, and much wisdom upon the important topic of “Singleness of Purpose”. Unfortunately, there’s no key, so you can’t check your answers, or look up a character you’re having trouble with.

Still, for twenty bucks or so, it’s not bad value. So drink deep from this golden cup of knowledge, and remember always that Excellence in Penmanship derives from a sharp eye and a sound mind, unsullied by the Demon Drink, or the excesses of Lustful Urges and the Sin of Onanism.

The super-sturdy telescoping space pen

This site was written for geeks, and if you are one, you will already know that the Fisher Space Pen was invented by Paul Fisher for use in the space program. It uses a pressurized cartridge, and an extra-thick ink (which stops the ink from getting pressurized all over your space capsule). It can can write in zero gravity or a vacuum or sub-zero temperatures.

There’s a myth that America spent millions developing the Space Pen, while the Russians solved the same problem by using pencils. The truth is that both sides used pencils, and when the Space Pen became available, both sides bought it and used it.

Fisher makes a wide range of pens, many of them using the Space Pen cartridge. As a writer, I like to carry a pen all the time, wherever I go. The Fisher “Bullet” Space Pens are my favourite – not so much for their vacuum writing abilities (although you never know when you’ll have to write an urgent help message to your friends inside the spaceship), but because, with their smooth, rounded edges, they are comfortable to carry in a trouser pocket.

One of the problems with the regular Bullet pens, though, is the finish. The pens are made of brass coated with chrome, or coloured epoxy, or other types of surface. It doesn’t seem to matter what they’re coated with, though, because after a year or so of removing the pen cap and putting it on the back of the pen, the finish invariably wears off, and the pen starts to look UGLY.

The telescoping model is different. It’s made of solid aluminum, and is far more durable than any of the Bullet pens. Maybe the design isn’t quite as pleasing, but it’s about the same size as a Bullet Pen, about as good to write with, and easier to open with one hand. There seem to be two variations in shape – one has a rounded edge to the back, the other has a slightly more pointed edge.

The opening mechanism is unusual and extremely simple. The ballpoint cartridge slides into the centre part of the pen and never moves. In front of it, a metal collar can pull back to uncover the pen tip. A plunger on the back connects to a steel pin which runs through to the front of the pen. When you pull the plunger, the collar retracts, and you can write with the pen. Press the plunger down again, and the collar extends back over the point. The fact that you have to pull to write, not push, makes this pen perfect for a pocket, because it won’t open accidentally.

So, how is it for writing shorthand? Well, there are pros and cons.

First the cons. The Fisher ink is fairly thick. It requires ve-e-ery slightly more effort to move across the page than some pens. It takes a fraction of a second longer to start writing than other ballpoints. It seems to dry more quickly – sometimes, if I make a dot, I get nothing. I’ve also had my share of dud refills which develop a slow, oozing leak. I could return them to Fisher for a free replacement, but I can’t be bothered. I’d rather they just didn’t leak. There also seems to a problem with tolerances for refill diameter. I’ve bought some refills that were too loose to fit the Telescoping Space Pen (although they would work fine in the other Space Pens). If you get this pen, and buy a refill, take the pen with you and check that it fits before you leave the store.

But on the plus side, the range of Fisher refills is amazing. The best thing about them for shorthand purposes is the range of widths – Fine, Medium or Bold. Wide tips used to be a common option, but in the last few years they’ve become harder to find as people chase after finer and finer points. The bold refill from Fisher is really good for getting a range of lines, from thin to thick. The range of ink colours is impressive, too. It includes not only the usual black, blue and red, but also green, burgundy, turquoise, purple, brown, indelible blue, and silver. There’s even an ultra-violet ink so you can send shorthand messages to bees.

I’ve had this pen for several years now. The logo has worn off, but the aluminum surface doesn’t show any other signs of wear, and, although it cost more than some of my other Fisher pens, it’s by far the most durable, and is good value.

The Joy of Pitman Shorthand is a site created by Pierre Savoie years ago. I have a soft spot for this site, because it’s one of the ones that first got me interested in Pitman. Pierre includes some interesting facts about the history of Pitman, as well as some of the more unusual outlines. He is generous with his links, connecting (most unwisely) to the hated sites of the Gregg-shorthand heretics, but also (most wisely) to my own site. http://pitmanshorthand.homestead.com/

Beryl Pratt is an expert Pitman writer from Kent in England, who’s on a one-woman mission to keep Pitman’s New Era shorthand alive. Written with a nice sense of humour, her site contains a wealth of information on every aspect of Pitman, including advice on pens, pencils (regular and mechanical), reference books, paper, and practical tips. There are also lessons, and hundreds of examples of handwritten shorthand symbols.  http://www.long-live-pitmans-shorthand.org.uk/index.htm

Ever wonder which system of shorthand we should learn? If you have, you will find the answers you’re looking for in E. Barker’s Which System of Shorthand Should We Learn?, a book from the early 1900s, available for download or reading online at The Internet Archive. Mr Barker carries out a detailed study of various shorthand systems used in the United States, and discusses their shortcomings. He concludes that the best system is Isaac Pitman’s. The books is published by Pitman’s company, and ends with ads and endorsements for Pitman’s books, so not exactly an unbiased opinion. But it’s interesting to see some of the criticisms of the other systems – particularly the biggest threat, Gregg Shorthand.
http://www.archive.org/stream/whichsystemofsho00barkiala#page/n1/mode/2up

Bob Sanderson - Language innovator from Big Meat Eater

In the 1982 cult horror film Big Meat Eater, nerdy butcher Bob Sanderson works to promote Adanaco, the “new universal language” he’s developed for his small English-speaking town. Inventing new languages, or new ways to write old ones, has been a geeky obsession for hundreds of years.

Benjamin Franklin, irritated by the inconsistencies of English spelling, invented his own new alphabet in 1779. Alexander Graham Bell came up with another one, called Visible Speech, based on the positions of the tongue, mouth, and throat. George Bernard Shaw regularly railed against the stupidity of English spelling, and, after he made a fortune from My Fair Lady, he sponsored the development of a new style of writing known as Shavian – although he did most of his own writing in Pitman.

There are dozens of other proposed methods for reforming the written language. Some, like Pitman, Unifon, Interbet, and Quikscript, use special characters. Others, proposed by numerous societies and individuals, involve simplifying English spelling. But most proposals are based on the same commonsense idea – that words should be written the way they sound. (This is not always easy in practice – a word spoken by one person may sound different when spoken by another.) Enthusiasts point out that, if English spelling were reformed, the language could be learned faster by native speakers, and taught more easily to foreigners.

But when Isaac Pitman invented his “Stenographic Soundhand” system, back in the 1830s, it was eagerly taken up by people who saw it as a way to banish the madness of English spelling, and turn written English writing into something standardized and rational. It was a writing system the whole British Empire could use! And why stop at English? Using Pitman as a universal system, every language could be written in the same way. You could listen to a language you didn’t understand and write it down perfectly, or read words in a language you didn’t understand, and have your words understood by a native speaker. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

Isaac Pitman must have been caught up in the same frenzy of excitement. His early books on shorthand included appendices explaining how to use the same writing system to write Russian, French, Spanish, and even Latin and Ancient Greek.

Over time, the Pitman system changed. The people pushing the change were the court reporters – the people who keep the official records of court proceedings. For them, the most important thing about Pitman was its speed, and various changes were made to the system, so it became steadily faster. The downside was that shorthand also became more complex. A system that could originally be learned in a week eventually took months to learn properly, and became too complicated to work well as an international language. George Bernard Shaw lamented the way that the evolution of shorthand had been driven by reporters.

The emphasis on speed is also what has led to shorthand’s death, or, at least, its comatose state. These days, we have many ways to record speech in real time – for example, a digital recorder. But English is still a cow to write, and people are still reinventing a wheel that has been reinvented hundreds of times in the past, by proposing new systems for writing it.

Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897)

The best way to learn Pitman is to get a book and work slowly through the lessons. But you don’t need me to tell you that.

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you get bored easily. You’re too impatient to order the book and wait for it in the mail. You want to jump right in and try this stuff, see if it’s right for you.

That’s why I’ve put together a series of lessons which will teach you some of the basics of Pitman. It starts with a quick and dirty version of Pitman which you can learn fast and play around with. It’s not real shorthand – because that takes a long time to learn – but IS a totally usable system. It will get you familiar with the characters, and it can be expanded and built on until you can write honest-to-goodness 200 words-a-minute shorthand.

Right now, it covers a set of basic characters. I’ll add more Pitman characters over time. That is, if I don’t get too bored.

1. Pitman Longhand

2. Consonants

3. More consonants

4. Some vowels for a change

5. Oh no, even more consonants

6. This better be the last of the consonants

7. More vowels

8. Writing words – and about time too.

The elegant Pilot Decimo

Some Pitman writers will swear that the best way to write Pitman shorthand is with a fountain pen. I went through a phase of trying various fountain pens to see if any of them suited me. The Pilot Decimo was one. It’s one of a range of pens from Pilot (also sold under the name Nakimi), under the name “Capless” or “Vanishing Point”. It’s a fairly expensive pen, with a fancy gold or rhodium nib.

All the pens in this series use the same basic design, and it’s a clever one. The nib is retractable – just like a regular ballpoint. You press the button at one end, and the nib pops out of the other.

Making a retractable fountain pen presents some engineering challenges. First, any fountain pen can easily leak – if it’s shaken or jolted, ink flies off the nib. When a pen has a cap, this stray ink gets caught inside, but with a retractable pen, the ink could just leak out of the hole where the nib comes out. Pilot gets around this by adding a spring-loaded flap on the inside of the pen. When the nib retracts, the flap seals everything inside. (There’s a cheaper version of the same idea on Sharpie retractable markers.)

Fountain pens are usually stored with the nib pointing upwards. Again, this reduces the chance for leaking, and that poses the other engineering challenge for the Pilot Capless pens too. Normally, a pen clip is placed at the end of the pen furthest from the tip, but with the pen pointed down, ink could easily pool inside, and sploosh out as soon as you opened it. To prevent this problem, the designers put the pen clip on the opposite end of the pen – it’s at the nib end, not the push-button end. If you clip it to a pocket, the nib will point upwards, and any stray ink will flow back into the pen’s reservoir, not out of the nib. That means that, when you write with the pen, you have to place your fingers over the clip. The clip is flat and smooth, so I thought it was reasonably comfortable to use, but I’ve read some reviews by people who didn’t like this arrangement.

These pens come in a couple of sizes. The regular Vanishing Point pens are quite fat – a bit too much so for my taste, so I ordered a slimmer model, a little hard to find, called the Decimo. All the pens use the same interchangeable nib cartridges, some with gold nibs, and a few with rhodium plated nibs, although the difference is mostly cosmetic. The cartridge is quite tiny, meaning that this pen runs out of ink faster than you’d expect from its size.  On the plus side, if you don’t like the thickness of the nib, replacement nibs in different sizes are inexpensive. At least, they’re inexpensive compared to the price of the pen.

Besides the cool gimmickry, one of the things that drew me to this pen were reports that it had a relatively springy nib. I figured, great, springy means you can draw thick and thin lines easily – perfect for Pitman! Unfortunately, when I bought one, I didn’t find it was any springier than my old 1970s Sheaffer.  The ink flow is not the greatest, either. I found if I wrote fast, it would occasionally skip. I tried various inks, and bought three different nibs cartridges, including one that had been “broken in” by an expert pen dealer, and they all had the same problem. But other people haven’t complained about this, so perhaps it’s the way I write.

Anyway, all in all, this is a very geek-cool, stylish line of pens. I didn’t find it was the ideal pen for shorthand, and it won’t let you do thick and thin lines like you see in the shorthand books, but it does have a kind of eccentricity that I like.

Teach Yourself Shorthand: Pitman New Era.

This book, by an uncredited author, has been around a lo-o-o-ong time. It was first published in 1949, and has been reprinted many times since then, with a wide variety of covers, but mostly the same text inside.

It’s an easy book to find, and probably the cheapest of all the Pitman titles – a real bargain! If you buy second hand, you’ll probably pay more in shipping than you pay for the book.

What’s particularly good about it, and where it differs from most Pitman titles, is that it’s designed to be used at home. That means you get keys to all the exercises in the back.

Another thing I like about this title is the writing examples, which are more varied than in many Pitman books. You get some of the typical business stuff (“My Dear Sir, thank you for your letter of 14th November…”) but other examples are more varied  (“Perhaps I ought to begin at the beginning and tell you how it happened that I was on the train that evening…”).

The newer editions of this book come in two flavours – New Era and Pitman 2000. If you’re following the version of Pitman on these pages, make sure you get the New Era edition. (The Pitman 2000 edition of the one shown here is similar, but has a green cover.) Mind, you, at the price this book usually sells at, if you do buy the wrong one, the mistake shouldn’t cost you much.