Shards of Consciousness

I love to write. Each day and each month I practice I get better at it (I hope). But I don't like the mechanics of writing. Communicating ideas, reinforcing learning, expressing an emotion, this is what I really enjoy. Attending college brought home just how much I dislike the mechanics of writing. I couldn't keep up taking notes in class. I would lose my train of though as it had to slow down to my writing speed when I was drafting a paper. I found that writing longhand was bogging me down.

Then there is all the other writing we do for ourselves in our daily lives. We jot down ideas for blog posts. We make grocery lists. We draft articles, fiction, and poetry. We create our lists of tasks we have to complete or projects to work on. All of this writing takes time, time that can be better spent actually doing a task, playing with your baby, or taking a walk with your wife or husband.

I didn't want to learn shorthand, so I looked for another method of speedwriting. I found it in the book Notescript by Laurence F. Hawkins. The book was published in 1964 by Barnes & Noble Books. The technique of notescript was just what I was looking for. It was easy to learn, called for few special symbols, and brought my writing speed up to my thinking speed. Better yet, it can be used in typing if you are of the mind to do so. The book is long out of print, with only a few used copies still on the market. (No, mine isn't for sale, any more than my copy of Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer is for sale.)

General Concepts

The main goals for notescript are to increase writing speed while retaining the reliability of being able to read what you wrote at a later date. It succeeded admirable at this for me, as long as I wrote legibly. You will need to write with well-formed letters or you won't be able to read what you wrote at a later date.

Notescript uses just a few main principles to increase writing speed:

1. For very short words specified character is substituted for the word. For example '\' is used for 'the', '/' is used for 'and'.
2. Letters, primarily vowels, are eliminated according to a set of rules, so you normally are just writing consonants. For example, 'receive' become 'rcv'. 'People' becomes 'ppl'.
3. Letters are never altered. Sometimes people try to do something like write 'rough' as 'ruf'. This isn't done in notescript.
4. Some letters use a simplified form. For example, the letter 't' is not crossed.
5. Many suffixes and prefixes, and some words have special (not rule-based) abbreviations.

Notescript is generally an appearance-based system of speed writing so you can recognize the words when you go back to read them.

Gameplan

This will be a series of articles teaching the rudiments of notescript. I'll follow along with the my copy of the book, simplifying it somewhat and giving a few practice sentences for you to work on each lesson. I plan to publish two lessons a week, Tuesday and Friday, until we are done. Some of the symbols used will require verbal explanation, as they aren't on an English language keyboard. For example, 'in' is written as an 'n' with a dot over it. Other abbreviations don't make sense if you are using notescript for typing. Some of these will be covered as we go along, others at the end of the course. I hope you find this system of speed writing as useful as I have over the years in saving time, paper, and frustration with the mechanics of writing.