Comparing shorthand and regular writing is a disingenuous way to make an argument, to say the least. It's like comparing a text file with the same file, but co

Comparing shorthand and regular writing is a disingenuous way to make an argument, to say the least. It's like comparing a text file with the same file, but compressed in some obscure format, like ACE. You'll spend orders of magnitude more time finding a single person who can read your shorthand than learning it and writing whatever it was that needed to be written. The advantage of normal writing (whether cursive or hybrid cursive/print) is that, in theory, barring extreme cases, everyone can read it or at least guess the context from the words. The Gregg shorthand you linked looks like a bunch of scribbles and might as well be Chinese glyphs or Hebrew to a layman. If the goal is to write notes for personal use, I think that time's long gone and most information is available online and can be easily referenced in seconds with search queries (unlike a hand written notebook, where you must store a mental index of the contents). > If you want your handwriting to "look nice", treat it as an art form, because that is what you are doing when aesthetics supercedes practicality. It doesn't need to "look nice", just legible enough to convey information or a part information, from which the rest can be inferred by context.