This is a shorthand I’ve developed over the last 6 months. Its based on Taylor Shorthand but I’ve made a number of changes which I think make it easier to read and write.

Like in Taylor, words are written phonetically with medial vowels left out. Its written left to right and each word should be written without lifting the pen, except for placing vowels at the start and end of words.

It’s a geometric shorthand where every character is designed to be as simple as possible and written in a continuous motion.

The most common letters use the simplest shapes.

The departures from Taylor include the removal of Taylor’s ‘hook’ characters which in practice rely on a thickness distinction. Such distinctions would be fully codified in Pitman’s shorthand which realised how the thickness of a line could be used to reduce the total number of distinct shapes needed. But this really doesn’t lend itself to writing with modern pens.

To compensate for the loss of the hook shapes, I’ve introduced two wide arched characters for the M and W. These are, I think, borrowed from T-Line and possibly others. The make sense and it’s easy to learn because they are inversions of each other.

I’ve made N resemble a lowercase letter N. That character was a K before. K is now a C shape, which makes more sense. TH is what M was and SH is what H was. CH is taken to be equivalent to SH in the same way that S can be Z.

Sentences can be punctuated by commas and they are terminated with X. I write on the line, not above it if I can as I find this helps with making it clear where one character stops and another starts.

I personally found it hard to remember to place a dot under the last letter to represent LY endings. I also found the flick on the end of words for ING easily mixed up with an R. So, I double dot for ING and I don’t abbreviations for other suffixes.

I experimented with using superscripts at the ends of words for abbreviated suffixes but I felt this added more complexity than it did speed.

Takeaway

If you’re just after a way to write notes more quickly, you may want to try Speedwriting which feels like the way to get the fastest results for the least effort. This system might be technically faster with a very well practiced writer but if you want to be the fastest that you might consider Gregg or another popular system.

Mine is really meant as a kind of private writing. I like the way the characters neatly fit together. It could work well in a TTRPG campaign as a kind of code to solve although I’ve not tried this with my group.