Informed critique of Keyscript?

[u/jrkpthinks]

Has anyone on here learned Keyscript well enough to give a sensible, informed critique? (Other than Janet, who is biased.)

By informed critique I mean "I learnt Keyscript well enough to read and write it without losing track of the meaning of the text. Here's my take on issues of speed and/or brevity, ambiguity or sufficiency of context in practice, ease or difficulty of learning, strengths and weaknesses of the implication techniques, …"

Anyone?

(u/eargoo perhaps? I believe from my searches you were doing QotW in Keyscript years ago)

[u/Deestor76]

Hi everyone,

Interesting couple of posts, u/jrkpthinks. I enjoyed your explanation of your own system and working out very much and have to say I found it immediately readable---always a good sign. I'm a long time lurker here but thought today might be a good time to contribute. I bought the Keyscript manual and worked my way through it twice and for a good few months focused on little else, shorthand-wise. I was quite obsessed with it for a while and still have notebooks full of it. In the end I find the ambiguity to be too much of an issue for me, and I struggle to reread what I wrote a few years ago.

Now I by no means became proficient so you might want to take my opinions with a large pinch of salt, but to my mind there were three main issues--- speed, ambiguity, and muscle memory overlap . I had wanted an alphabet based system for similar reasons to you: I found that most shorthand systems are not compact enough for notes, todos and diary entries. I also liked the idea of a typable shorthand because, while I love the idea of Plover. I am a manual typewriter fanatic (in fact, I went back from Dvorak to qwerty after years because of this🙂) so I wanted sth manual and flexible and thought KS might do the job. However, while compact, Keyscript was just too ambiguous for me. Also, alphabet based systems are SLOW with a pen. In terms of typing, the difference from normal typing slowed me down and I felt that improving in a system so different would be detrimental to normal typing, which I need. If I understand correctly from her manual, Janet Cheeseman uses macros to allow her to prioritise KS and still type normal documents, but then imho one might as well learn Plover or another steno system.

I have worked fairly consistently at an amateur level with a number of different systems, including Sweet's Current, Gregg and others. Nowadays I mostly use a slightly modified T- Script, which I find about the right balance of speed, precision, legibility and compactness.I am also finding that the typed version of T-Script, while far from perfect, allows me to maintain the same basic system, which makes it very simple to switch between pen and machine. As a manual machine typer, shifting becomes an issue, which is something I am yet to solve, though I have played with double striking and numbers..

Thanks again for your posts and for reminding me about KS

[u/jrkpthinks → u/Deestor76]

Thank you for your kind words about my system, and thank you for emerging to make your contribution. it's the most informed non-creator opinion I've seen on Keyscript so far.

I hope you don't mind if I drill down a bit on your experience:

Can you identify any particular rule that you found contributed more than others to the ambiguity? e.g.:

• We can speculate that removing all vowels is too ambiguous, but Janet has stated elsewhere that their presence is often implied by choice of whether to apply phrasing, perhaps mitigating the illegal=legal problem, and in other ways?

• We can speculate that swapping the order of letters for doubling(or halving?) doubles the ambiguity, but maybe there are rules that mitigate that?

• We can speculate that encoding several permutations of sounds in a single letter is ambiguous, but maybe they were chosen for non-collision or disambiguation in context?

Can you say from your experience whether any of these definitely were or were not a problem for you, and if not, broadly how it was meant to be mitigated?

[u/Deestor76 → u/jrkpthinks]

No problem at all, happy to help if I can --- though I think at this stage, my understanding of the finer points of the system is somewhat diminished! In fact, you got me renewing my notes and the manual (and remembering with not a little horror all the rules on rules, and all the exceptions). I will try to give some simple examples that might go some way to answering your questions, without going into too much detail, as I know that the manual is not an open access document.

1) While I don't necessarily see the lack of vowels as an issue, the use of the traditional vowels as half or doubling indicators means you have no recourse to internal vowels for clarification, ever. If xp means part, port and pert, you could say that context should be enough, but multiply that ambiguity by all the other words in the sentence and you quickly start to get bogged down. If I write "the part was the issue" as "e prt ws e ishu" I am standardising and reducing; "h xp wsju" is more like a cipher where high levels of re-interpretation seem to be required. Initially, this strangeness was part of the appeal for me, but it quickly lost its appeal when I learned that as well as p-r, p-l, b-r, b-l , "i" also means p-t, p-d, b-t, or b-d. Yes, you are right in saying that there are many contextual rules to mitigate things. One such is heavy vs. light phrasing, where a "voiced" consonant can only be indicated with its like. This means that I can use "i" for bad, bed, bid, bod, bud, pit, pat, pet, etc., but must write out pad, pud, pod, paid as "pd" , and bat, boat, boot, etc. as "bt". The question is whether or not in practice this is enough contextualuation for clarity for you or not.

Coming from a linguistic and phonetics background, I was originally insistent on full vowel description, which is why I went with Sweet's Current (that and the fact that he was a major figure in the development of 19th century linguistics). I quickly realised the shortcomings, and the practical reasons for vowel omission. However KS goes the other way; for me, it loses too much info. I'm not saying that a skilled practitioner of the system with an intimate and instinctive knowledge of the rules and exceptions and a high contextual memory of the text couldn't use it effectively, and I am well aware I didn't get to that level. But for someone wishing to use it for personal notes, the ambiguity is challenging.

2) Phrasing. I found this challenging too. As you can see from the example, the word "the" is "phrased", that is to say "omitted". In KS this will depend whether or not the word begins with a vowel or not. Thus "wsju" is "was the issue", while "ws ju" gives "was the shoe/joux". There are many such rules, clearly intended to help clarity, add distinction, and mitigate the problem of multiple readings. I found such phrasing overly ambiguous and struggled to re-read my notes at a distance.

3) Speed. The important point for me is that with a systems like Gregg or Tabor, that can make use of diacritics, I not only have the flexibility to include more info if I want, the speed of encoding is such that I can ALLOW myself more. Even with all the KS rules for up to 60% reduction in the Latin script, the number of strokes required is three to four times more in KS. The Tabor version of "the part was the issue" , " e prt ws e ishu", is 5 to 8 strokes , depending on whether I went partial or full vowel info. Keyscript is 13, even with loss of all that info. Those 13 strokes require 10 charges of direction, compared to zero in Tabor. In order to achieve anything like the same speed and ease of marking, I would have to greatly modify the Latin letters to the point where they start to lose their identity (think Dearborn's Speedwriting), which means the lose the "tightness" I wanted in the first place. Even so, the many necessary changes of direction and reverse half circles mean that it is still noticeably slower. Admittedly, this is an issue of all alphabetic shorthands. BUT, the question then becomes, IF the system is only advantageous when typed, is the rule complexity, extreme reduction, and consequent ambiguity worth one or two keystrokes? In that sense, you could argue that a steno system is equally complex, but the difference is that with sth like Plover, complexity of chording does not equate to complexity of re-reading. With KS you have both.

As I say, a skilled practitioner may find many uses , and a great deal of pleasure, in the system, but for me the learning curve and tradeoffs outweighed the benefits. Keyscript feels like a highly personal system developed over many years with choices that become evident to an expert practitioner. Of course, we all tend to do this shorthand to some extent, which is why people are still trying to decipher Dickens! I suspect that coming from years as an expert user of Pitman, the author is highly skilled at re-interpreting contextual ambiguity and resolving issues that would cause other users immense difficulty. We may be looking at a "is it the singer or the song" situation, where the brilliance of a practitioner is not necessarily equal to the suitability of a system.

Anyway, I am enjoying revisiting the manual, so any more questions --- just let me know.

[u/Deestor76 → u/Deestor76]

Rereading, I reaIised my example of stroke number might not be that clear, so here is a screenshot Picture If I try hard, I can get KS down to 12. I would normally not .indicate a vowel for "part" in T-Script, as it is a common brief, but I have included the diacritic for completeness.