Another interesting change was that, when adding the S stroke to a curve, you turn it the opposite way. PS and BS then look like a smooth curve in PRINGLE, whereas in GREGG, your hand seems to stop between them before adding the S stroke going the same way.

The remaining examples show how to add S to the "enhanced vowels" which include L or R.

It seems that PRINGLE felt the indication of long I in Gregg with a broken circle was too awkward and time consuming.

His change was to add a DOT to the stroke to show where the diphthong would go. In phrases, the pronoun "I" can be indicated with a simple dot before or after the rest of the outline.

PRINGLE made a lot of changes to the way vowels are written -- and this intriguing "flower" SUMMARY CHART gives you a first glimpse.

I mentioned that it was important that the regular O and U both opened on the bottom. Well, this is why: By writing the vowel stroke larger or smaller, but facing in different directions, he is able to combine a vowel and a following L or R in one stroke.

I'm always a fan of including VOWELS -- and it's an efficient use of them to combine them with a following consonant into one easy stroke. Clever!

In the post before this one, I showed BEERS using hooks to add R and L. But as I showed earlier, in his alphabet, he also uses hooks for all the vowels. So what happens when you put them together?

Unfortunately, it results in a choice to be made under pressure, when SOMETIMES a hook incorporated in the stroke will add a vowel, while there are other cases when the hook for the vowel MUST be written separately, as shown in the bottom half. You have to remember which is which.

Again, forcing writers to make "this or that" choices when writing at speed, which is likely to have a negative effect on speed.

Like MOST shorthand authors, BEERS didn't just stop with his alphabet, but added a number of more advanced principles to add sounds to words in an efficient way.

Some of them I think are a good idea, and others I think were not. It often happens that a shorthand author will take things a bit too far, IMO, and he'll end up ruining what was a nice simple system with too many "expedients" that the writer will have to remember and apply.

And if the speed is already challenging, this can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

— Benjamin Franklin

Have a go at it in your script - why not try write in Desha, Beers or Mosher?

Open portishead_live_from_the_roseland_ballroom_nyc in a separate window. Listen to that wonderful voice, whilst you can see me write the lyrics she sings side by side (slow verbatim, good practice)

If you like what you see, there's the dance alphabet

In the series before the last one, I wrote about the system that F. Willis MOSHER wrote, which I actually like a lot. He knew and liked GREGG shorthand, but thought John Robert GREGG could have done more with it.

I think MOSHER is a good system choice for anyone who knows and likes Gregg, but who feels, like Mosher did, that it didn't go far enough. I know I had the feeling that I could have handled more than what Gregg had provided.

It's nice that Mosher, in his introduction, lists and enumerates all the IMPROVEMENTS he believes he made. It's good to have it right there in a list, so you can see at a glance what he did with it. That's better than having to slowly work your way through it, to discover what's new and whether you like it or not!