I'm going to try to pick this thread up from the "What's stopping the uptake of Shorthand" thread.
My thesis was that a reason that Shorthand isn't used much today is that there are no suitable materials for today's world. In particular, I notice that the people who express an interest in learning shorthand are, like myself, taking university courses and want the ability to take efficient notes. In addition, my degree field requires an ability to take notes while interviewing or doing field research. Since I don't have a staff to transcribe dictation for me, I'd a lot rather be able to take shorthand notes. And I don't think I'm alone.
I don't know if McGraw-Hill would be interested in publishing any new material, or how tight their hold on Gregg shorthand is if an author wanted to put out a book through another publisher. But self-help books are constantly showing up on bookshelves, so one possibility would be to publish teaching materials geared to the undergraduate, graduate, and professional in a variety of fields.
One person (Balyn) proposed another possibility:
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May I suggest that you start another thread relative to building vocabularies and reading in the areas that you outline in your message. I think that enough of us out there can create shorthand plates that legible enough for others to read and learn from. In addition, anyone could request shorthand scripts of short passages to be written and uploaded.
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If I understand the suggestion, someone would organize a project to produce graded reading materials in a variety of fields and put them in the documents section of this group or on a separate web page.
One problem is producing graded materials. That's hardly a trivial pursuit. And of course the next problem is finding people to write out accurate shorthand. Producing the plates is then just a matter of scanning them to a jpg. And the final problem is choosing a system. There's a great deal of commonality between Anniversary and Simplified, and if and a little care could probably produce material which could be read in either system.
But in addition to reading material, I'd like to include basic lessons similar to those in the manual.
I haven't really spent any time at the semi-commercial websites which offer lessons. I haven't thought their focus was enough different to justify the cost. But perhaps one of them would be interested in building a course for note-taking rather than dictation. It would be neat to do it as an internet project, but I certainly don't have the knowledge to contribute and those who are qualified to put in the time and effort might well (and justifiably) feel they should be compensated for their time.
(by john19970 for everyone)
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