Having tried Gregg and Pittman, I strongly prefer Gregg, in part because of the ease of finding instructional and reading material in the public domain, all the

Having tried Gregg and Pittman, I strongly prefer Gregg, in part because of the ease of finding instructional and reading material in the public domain, all the way to a complete transcription of Alice in Wonderland[1]. More importantly, though, is that Gregg is--in the terms used by the marketers of the system in the early 1900s--written and not drawn. It flows left-to-right at least as easily as the Latin alphabet, and can be adapted to suit whatever slant and curvature you typically write with in longhand. There was simply less of a barrier for entry as far as getting the shape down on paper for me. Be advised, however, that learning shorthand can take a tremendous amount of time--at least to get "up to speed" at it. The system of strokes, hooks, and loops is not in and of itself difficult to master; it's the profusion of brief forms, detached endings, and so on that take a great deal of time to become fluent at. Having used Gregg every day for the past six months, I can say that I write and read with comfort, more or less--but I'm certainly not reading mine or others' shorthand at the speed at which I can read longhand. And I'm definitely not able to take dictation yet (not that I have need to), any more than I could do so typing on a QWERTY keyboard. (As quick but hopefully instructive examples, the form "AL" can mean "I will," "allow," "ail," or "ale"; an attached "F" at the end of a form can mean "-ful", "-ify", or simply the sound "f"; there is nothing to distinguish the prefixes "es-" and "ex-" except by what follows them; "pend," "pent," "gend," and "gent" all look precisely the same; and so do "nt" and "nd," "det" and "ted," and "mem," "men," "min," "mim", and a handful of others.) I've tried out Plover, and my experience with Gregg definitely made it more approachable than I think it would have been otherwise. One of the advantages it has over written shorthand, however, is that it is purely a writing, not a written, system. There is no need to learn to read it. That said, I find shorthand a joy--and it is vastly more portable than a full QWERTY keyboard. [1] http://gregg.angelfishy.net/ http://gregg.angelfishy.net/ is a good compendium for English-language Gregg. The "Anniversary Edition" has the most texts. The "Simplified Edition" is a little more manageable in size, but is much more recent and still under copyright in most markets.