It isn't often that you find shorthand in the news - despite the fact that, in the UK at least, it is nearly always behind the news in the form of reporters' notes. So I was really chuffed to see one of the UK's regional papers pay homage to a shorthand coach who had been training its staff for the past 11 years. The Plymouth Herald story in question is about 78-year-old shorthand teacher June Barker who has retired 62 years after first learning shorthand. As with many people, June first learned Pitman and then Teeline. For the full story>>

This is surely a first for shorthand on the web – a newsheet web-page rendered entirely in shorthand. [caption id="attachment_67" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="a newspaper in shorthand"][/caption] Prof Waldir Cury runs the excellent Taquigrafia website in Brazil and is an expert shorthand practitioner. Keen to help his students improve their shorthand skills, he has now taken the plunge and developed an entire web page in shorthand. And he now plans to release a new newspage entirely in shorthand each month! In his note to the MSN Gregg Shorthand group, Prof Cury said: “I invite you to take a look at the new page of my website: a whole page in Shorthand. “Its name: “Shorthand Newspaper”.  Every month a new page will be launched.  The aim: to help the online students to develop their shorthand reading. “I hope you like the idea.  And I also hope that many other shorthand website owners will do the same, so that we can have in a very short time many shorthand pages like that – using different systems. “The system used in the “Shorthand Newspaper” is the Maron System, a Brazilian one.  So, I hope you will like it.” Waldir – for what it is worth I think it is an inspired idea ...

He was one of the greats of modern shorthand. But have you ever wondered what became of his books, letters and, yes you guessed it, his pen? Well Shorthand World decided to go on the Pitman history trail to find out more. Born in Trowbridge (Wiltshire) in 1813, Isaac Pitman trained and worked as a teacher. But his name will forever be almost synomymous with shorthand – thanks to his invention of a ’stenographic system’. In June 1839 he took up residence in Bath and shortly afterwards opened a ’school for young gentlemen’ where phonographic writing was taught alongside other subjects. By 1843 the use of stenographic sound-hand, or phonography, was becoming increasingly widespread and Pitman found it necessary to give up his school to concentrate on the full-time production of instruction manuals and other phonographic literature. He established his first printing press and by 1873 was publishing over 80,000 phonographic works a year. By the time of his death in 1897, Pitman’s shorthand, still used in offices today, was commercially successful, widely popular and internationally renowned. Bath University’s Library and Learning Centre now holds a number of items which once belonged to the great man. In 2004, the centre acquired one of Sir ...