As a follow-up of my New Notebook article, I’ve added a guide to making up your own shorthand.
This is useful in many, many ways. You can’t imagine how many times I use my own set of shorthand. I do this when I need to write down fast notes, when I just had an idea, or when I want to produce massive quantities of pages in a short time.
The point of your own set of shorthand is to speed up your writing. This is why we use easy easy, fast slashes, swirls and dots for shorthand and not complex symbols.
If you’ve seen Japanese writing, you’ll know exactly what you need to not do. Hyrogliphs are generally taboo too, because they’re based on comlex symbols, not easy letters.
You don’t always need to have symbols for every single letter. Sometimes you’ll only want to have stuff for the phonetics. You won’t really need “c”, because you already have “s” and “k”. You really don’t need a symbol for “q” either, because you can have “k”.
Also, you can have symbols for common combinations of letters. “Ee” is a given. If you have a symbol for “ee”, you don’t need a symbol for “ea” and “y” (as a vowel). “The” is another common combinaton. You’ve got “there,” they,” “these,” and a ton more.
The last way is to make a symbol for every single word, or the common ones at least. I don’t like this system, but it has certain advantages. However, it can be good short-term. If you’re taking notes on a lecture that has the same long words over and over again, you’ll want to make a key at the top of the page with symbols and apply them to only one sheet. These should be hyrogliphs and should probably be obvious and easily detected.
Here are some additional sites that can help.
http://www.alysion.org/handy/althandwriting.htm
http://www.alysion.org/handy/handyhand.htm
