Journalist Dennis Hollier uses a smartpen to write 225 words per minute — but it’s not the high-tech pen that lets him do that:
But [the optical character recognition software] doesn’t work for me, I explain, because even though I’m recording this interview with the latest model Sky wifi smartpen, I’m taking notes using a 19th Century technology called Gregg shorthand.
In many respects, Gregg is even more ingenious than the smartpen. And, although no electronics or gizmos were involved, it was a tremendously powerful and influential technology for nearly 100 years. Now, it’s become the key to my workflow in the Internet age.
Gregg is a way of compressing language. You are the machine that does the encoding and decoding. And your brain can do it in real time at very, very high speeds. To understand why, you have to know a little about how it works.
Gregg is basically a much simpler and more efficient writing system than longhand English. This starts with the letters themselves. The Roman alphabet, which we use to write English, is much more complicated than is strictly necessary to distinguish one letter from another. To print a lower-case “b”, for example, requires a long, downward stroke with a clockwise loop at the base. Then, you have to pick up your pen to move to the next letter, an extraneous step that takes up almost as much time as the writing itself. Cursive (when was the last time you heard that word?) may seem a little faster, but it actually requires additional strokes, short ligatures at the beginning and the end of each letter. That’s a lot of wasted motion, which is why cursive is actually only about 10 percent faster than print.
In contrast, Gregg’s “letters” are much simpler shapes.
If you wanted to be an executive secretary, you needed a certificate from Gregg saying you qualified at 150 words per minute. If you wanted to be a court reporter, you had to demonstrate you could write an astonishing 225 words per minute with better than 98 percent accuracy. Altogether, millions of people passed through Gregg training and the Gregg certification system.
For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses.