Hi everybody. Just a few days until Christmas and it is now snowing in the UK. These are some passages which have been on the site before but were taken off line during a complete site rebuild. Hopefully they'll be useful - either for those visiting the site for the first time or for those who have tried them before (though hopefully forgotten about them)... They're courtesy of WaveMedia and are taken, in Mp3 format, from the CDs which are available in the shop. [caption id="attachment_133" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="50 words per minute dictation passage"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_134" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="60 words per minute dictation exercise"][/caption]

After writing a previous post I got thinking about other shorthand-related videos that might be out there on the WWW. So, I searched for “shorthand” on YouTube and awaited the results. I’m not entirely sure it was such a great idea. One of the top results is a slightly bizarre nine-minute advert for Edison shorthand machines. Basically the plot is this – chaos in the office, Edison machine aquired, everybody happy (and as the ad tells you, it’s not even 5pm!). Then there’s a shorthand class, the camera work is somewhat fuzzy, dictation material is read out and then read back… The clearest videos I came across was a lady reading back her (very neat) notes to camera, and some rather nice note-taking from Portuguese dictation (like the use of the pencil, not sure about the ever increasing shift from the left of the page, over the margin, to the right) and this one with ball-point, again, from Portuguese dictation. In fact there’s another one, from the same uploader, which gives an excellent view of shorthand being taken down – this one is actually really good, the outlines are the right side the hand movement appears exemplary. Then there’s this very short lesson in Alpha ...