Gregg Shorthand: A fresh approach to Gregg Shorthand?

I was re-reading some of the posts about Notehand, S90 and, recently, Centennial, and started to think that the publishers of Gregg Shorthand missed an opportunity.

Late 20th century Gregg Shorthand could have benefited from a completely fresh approach to teaching the subject, and to shorthand theory, rather than simply revising the preceding text.

The idea I had in mind was similar to the approach Teeline originally took, although Gregg, being better designed, would be much faster.

The publishers should have promoted shorthand as a much more off-the-cuff and fun (and less intimidating) system, e.g. “We use these symbols for the sounds of the language, we use a few ‘tricks’ to speed things up (e.g. omit short ‘u’ before ‘n’), we recommend you use these affixes, we use a small number of abbreviated words, but otherwise, (the main theory principle), just write enough of a word to make it identifiable and then stop. There may be more than one way to write a word, which is okay. Now, get writing!”

The text books could be predominately letters, articles, short stories etc, in longhand, for the student to write in shorthand, with a key at the back of the book providing a recommended rendition into shorthand, perhaps with variants in brackets, the idea being that if the student’s shorthand approximates the model ‘answer’, they are progressing well. Later text books could contain more demanding material.