Stenoscript: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:11, 14 November 2014

Revision as of 13:20, 14 November 2014

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==History==

According to a profile published in ''The News'' (the daily newspaper in Frederick, Maryland, 8 April 1968), Avencena was attending law school at [[George Washington University]] in the late 1940s. He objected to the steep [[learning curve]] of [[Gregg shorthand]] and dropped the shorthand class course in order to devote his free time to developing a system that could be learned more quickly. After spending many hours in the [[Library of Congress]] 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.<ref>Information retrieved from worldcat.org 2014-11-14</ref> 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.<ref>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.</ref>

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==Writing==

Stenoscript is written using traditional longhand [[cursive]] characters with a few variations and special symbols. Lower-case letters are used for phonetically spelling words. Upper-case letters servehave asspecial abbreviations for common prefixes and suffixesmeanings, 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 vowels 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.<ref>M. Avencena, Stenoscript ABC Shorthand, 1967 revised edition.</ref>

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.