A hand holding out a ruled notebook bound with a wire spiral along its top edge

01

What the hobby actually involves

A lined pad, fifteen minutes

A session is fifteen or twenty minutes at a table with a lined pad. You copy a row of outlines (the shorthand shape of a word) from the manual, write a few sentences from the lesson, then read back what you wrote yesterday. Most systems are phonetic: you write the sounds you hear and drop silent letters, so "knee" is just n and e. The most common words get their own tiny abbreviations, and memorizing those few dozen shapes does more for your speed than anything else. Once the whole system is in your hand, usually after a few months, practice turns into taking down speech from recordings at a measured pace and nudging that pace up.

02

Which system should you start on?

Picking one puts that system's course book into the kit and takes the other two out. Pitman also brings its soft pencils. Pick it again to take it back out.

03

Your first two weeks

Tick each line off the pad as you finish it

A blank notepad bound with a wire spiral along its top edge, lying on a gray surface — A top-bound pad

What you can write in your first month

An alphabet card

Every stroke of your system on one index card, written from memory, to keep in the back of the pad.

A grocery list

Short everyday words that nobody else needs to read, and a real test when you are standing in the store.

A copied paragraph

A few lines from a book you like, written in shorthand and read back the next morning.

A week of diary entries

Three or four sentences a night, slow and careful, that only you can read.

04

What trips beginners up

What to expect, and three habits to drop

Expect to be slower than longhand for the first month or two. Speed arrives after the theory is finished, not during it.
Reading is harder than writing at first, and cold notes (ones you wrote a week ago) are harder still. That gap closes only by reading back everything you write.
Reaching 60 words a minute takes most people several months of short daily practice. Reaching 100 usually takes a year or more.
Fifteen minutes every day beats two hours on Sunday. Shorthand is a motor skill, and it fades quickly in the early weeks.
Do not write small and cramped to feel fast. Proportion is what makes outlines readable: a long stroke has to be clearly longer than a short one.
Do not invent your own abbreviations before you finish the manual. The system's own shortcuts are built so they never collide with each other, and yours will.
Do not chase speed before accuracy. An outline practiced badly at speed has to be unlearned later.

A small open notebook of handwritten notes with a pen lying across it, a lit candle behind

05

Four things people do with it

Open one to see where to start

Private journalsThe oldest use there is. A diary in shorthand can sit open on a desk. The base kit covers it.

Start here

Tonight, write three sentences about your day in longhand, then rewrite them in shorthand with the manual open. Do the same tomorrow and look up only the words that stopped you.

Faster notesLectures, meetings, interviews and phone calls. You do not need full speed to benefit, because a few dozen common words make up about half of everything anyone says.

Start here

At your next meeting or lecture, write only the ten most common words in shorthand and everything else in longhand. Add a few more words each week until the longhand is the exception.

Speed buildingTaking dictation at a measured pace and pushing it from 40 words a minute toward 100 and beyond, the way office and newsroom training always worked. The recordings are free.

Start here

Play a free dictation recording at the slowest speed on offer and take it down. Read your notes back aloud, circle every outline you could not read, and drill those before you play it again.

Teeline dictation library

Reading old shorthandDecoding a grandparent's notebook, the margins of a secondhand book or a historical diary. Identifying the system is the first job.

Start here

Photograph one page of the notebook, letter or diary you want to read and post it to the shorthand community. Someone will usually name the system within a day, which tells you which manual to open.

r/shorthand

Open a direction to see its first step. None of them needs gear beyond the pad, the pen and your system's course book.

06

Where to learn

The printed course book for your system is the backbone. Each one is a graded series of lessons with reading passages and a key, written for people teaching themselves.
Free online manuals and lesson sites cover all three systems, and the big scan archives hold readers and dictionaries for when you want more to read.
Post a photo of your page to the shorthand community when you are stuck. Experienced writers will mark the outlines that are out of proportion.
Dictation recordings graded by speed are free online. Any system can use them, because they are only speech at a set pace.
If none of the three systems appeals, a spelling-based system with a free manual can be learned in a few evenings and needs no book.

Free manuals, readers, dictation and a forum

A sharpened pencil lying across the blank pages of an open notebook — A pencil and a blank page

07

Why the kit is this small

Shorthand was designed for office workers with a pad and a pencil, so there is very little to buy. The pad, the pen and the index cards serve every system. The one real purchase is the course book, and it has to match your system, so each book sits behind its own add-on: switch on the one you chose and leave the other two out. Pitman adds a pack of soft pencils because its heavy and light strokes are easier to tell apart in graphite than in ink.

A stack of blank white cards on a white surface — Blank cards for the common words

08

Pack the pad and pen

Compare the options on each line, then set your tiers and check out from the cart. Clicking a card selects it there. The pad, the pen and the index cards start in the kit. Each course book joins when you switch on its system, and Pitman brings its pencils along.

Steno pad

essential · Paper

A narrow page split by a center line keeps each row short, so your hand barely travels sideways, and the top spiral lets you flip a full page out of the way in one motion. Practice fills pages quickly.

budget

National Steno Notebook, Gregg-Ruled, Green Eye-Ease Paper, Brown Cover, 6" x 9", 60 Sheets (36646)

4.6(4K)

$5.11

Shorthand

What the hobby actually involves

Which system should you start on?

Your first two weeks

What you can write in your first month

What trips beginners up

Four things people do with it

Where to learn

Why the kit is this small

Pack the pad and pen

Steno pad

Smooth fine-point pen

Blank index cards

Gregg shorthand manual

Pitman shorthand course book

Soft-lead pencils

Teeline shorthand course book