WriteFast

The CheatSheet abbreviation expander (see link at bottom of page) isn't just a way to type easier and faster. Once you have absorbed some of its short forms, you can also use them while taking hand-written notes, to speed up your note taking. How often have you struggled to keep up with lecture notes or someone dictating to you, and wished you could write just a little faster? With CheatSheet short forms, you could write: "This d th d t ot thi" as shorthand for "This and that and the other thing" and write only 20 letters instead of 34.

And if you want to speed your hand-written note taking up even more, I have developed a shorthand script you can use, called WriteFast. In this script, each letter is formed with a single stroke, and since standard letters take between two and three strokes to write, this can considerably speed up your notetaking. It will be almost as fast as traditional shorthand, but be a lot easier to learn and more convenient to use for three reasons: 1) It is an integrated system with CheatSheet, and you automatically learn its short forms while using CheatSheet, 2) it uses the ordinary letters a - z, which everyone is familiar with, rather than a special phonetic alphabet, 3) it doesn't need lined paper or a special pencil to do thick and thin lines -- it can be done with any pen or pencil on any kind of writing surface. The following illustration shows how all the letters are formed in this script. You will note that a dot is used for "th" and "ng", and that uppercase letters are indicated by a small circle at the start of the letter. Numerals and punctuation are exactly the same as in ordinary writing. Double consonants are always reduced to a single consonant. As you will see in the example of its use, letters within words are connected together wherever possible.

Note: The WriteFast Script is Copyright © Mark Mason, 2001 - all rights reserved. You can, however, use it free of charge for your own writing, and pass it on to others. If you wish to charge for teaching it, or in any other way make money from using it, you will need to seek permission from the author, Mark Mason, by e-mailing him at: mark (at) markmason (dot) net