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Stenoscript or ''Stenoscript ABC Shorthand'' is a
shorthand Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek ''st ...
system invented by Manuel C. Avancena (1923–1987) and first published in 1950. ''
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'', perhaps erroneously, claims it was based on a system published in London in 1607. An unrelated project also called Stenoscript was written by George A.S. Oliver and published in London in 1934.Information retrieved from worldcat.org 2014-11-14


History

According to a profile published in ''The News'' (the daily newspaper in Frederick, Maryland, April 8, 1968), Avencena was attending law school at
George Washington University The George Washington University (GW or GWU) is a Private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Chartered in 1821 by the United States Congress, GWU is the largest Higher educat ...
in the late 1940s. He objected to the steep
learning curve A learning curve is a graphical representation of the relationship between how proficient people are at a task and the amount of experience they have. Proficiency (measured on the vertical axis) usually increases with increased experience (the ...
of
Gregg shorthand Gregg shorthand is a form of shorthand that was invented by John Robert Gregg in 1888. Like cursive longhand, it is completely based on elliptical figures and lines that bisect them. Gregg shorthand is the most popular form of pen stenography in ...
and dropped the shorthand class in order to devote his free time to developing a system that could be learned more quickly. After spending many hours in the
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studying stenography and word frequency statistics, he eventually self-published his first Stenoscript book and taught classes to promote his system. Numerous revised editions of the Stenoscript manual were published through 1989. A Spanish edition was published in 1967, a book of dictation drills appeared in 1972 and Stenoscript dictionary was issued in 1989. The system was taught in some American high schools and colleges although it is difficult to determine how many. A few academic dissertations and theses compared the progress of Stenoscript students to learners of other systems.examples: ''The use of Forkner and Stenoscript ABC shorthand by selected Kansas high school graduates,'' Joanne R. Brookshier, Emporia State University, 1977; and ''An experimental study to compare productivity of Stenoscript ABC shorthand with Gregg shorthand,'' Janet Rae Weber, University of Colorado, 1968.


Writing

Stenoscript is written using traditional longhand cursive characters with a few variations (t's are not crossed, i's and j's are not dotted, m's and w's are written as a single long curve, and 'F' is written like a crossed '7') and a few punctuation marks (dash, slash, comma) used as letters. Lower-case letters are used for phonetically spelling words. Upper-case letters have special meanings, for example 'F' represents the suffix ''-ful'' or ''-fully'' and 'S' represents the letter-pair ''st''. Unless they are silent, vowels are written when they occur at the beginning or end of a word, but monophthongs within words are omitted: "bank" becomes ''bq.'' (The letter 'q' represents the ''-nk'' sound.) Instead of writing -ed or -d at the end of a word, Stenoscript indicates the past tense of a verb by underlining the final letter of the stem.M. Avencena, Stenoscript ABC Shorthand, 1967 revised edition. The author claimed that a student of his system could "attain a speed of 80 words a minute with comparatively little effort" and that speeds of 100 to 120 words per minute could be reached after intensive study and drilling.


Commentary

The system is a standardised form of abbreviation. For example, ''ak'' stands for "acknowledge" and all its derivations. Although it is generally slower to write in than more abbreviated forms of shorthand such as Gregg and Pitman, it remains closer to alphabetic orthography. For example, :I ak — k— k— :"I acknowledge the client's comment"


References

{{Use dmy dates, date=March 2017 Shorthand systems